How to Add Texture

Male: Hello, and welcome to a new easydigitals.com video tutorial. Remember you can get all of our high quality Photoshop and Photoshop element’s templates at easydigitals.com. Just click on the product button and don’t forget to sign up for our monthly newsletter. We give away free templates and tutorials each and every month along with product update info and coupons. Okay Kim, what easy tutorial are you going show us today?

Kim: Now I want to show you how to make this poster that we’ve been working on look a little bit more grungy. You see this technique a lot and actually, you don’t need this poster to use this technique. So I think it’s really useful.

First what you want to do is have some type of grunge layer what you can get at a lot of different sources. This is my grunge and I'm going to show you what it looks like with all of the other layers turned off by pressing the Alt-key and the eyeball. And this is basically what my grunge looks like.

Right now, my blending mode is set to hard light for this grunge. And that’s why you can see my photo behind it. You definitely wanted to have some type of blending mode and we’ll go over that in a little bit. So I’m going to go ahead and turn this back on. So this is how it looks. I have my layer in here with my photo. I'm going to turn on my full grunge. Basically, if you have Photoshop you can add a mask to this layer and we’re just going to mask off the parts that we don’t want the grunge to show through.

Now if you don’t have Photoshop, if you’re using elements, you can actually use the eraser tool in the exact same way and brush away the parts that you don’t want. You might want to make a backup copy of the grunge and keep that handy just in case you mess something up, if you have element. If you’re using a mask you can just add back in portions that you maybe accidentally take away.

So let’s go ahead and get started. I’m choosing a brush. You can make the brush larger and smaller. It’s soft bristled so I’m just going to ahead and pull this up and show you how it’s done. And I'm just going to choose a brush here. You can click you right bracket to make it larger or smaller as long as this is white and my black is on top here.

This is how you switch them. I'm just going to come in and start brushing away the grunge from the areas that I don’t want it on. If you accidentally brush too much away and there’s a way to fix that. I also have another grunge layer here, so that’s why there’s still a little grunge on his arm that’s not going away which is fine. And sometimes it’s good to zoom in here and really be able to what you’re doing.

I'm going to press my left bracket to make brush a little bit smaller and you can see what’s going on over here how it’s turning black and that means that it’s masking that part. You might want a little on it sure but we’re going to go ahead and remove it on his fingers.

And that’s pretty good. From looking at this I can see that I missed a little bit on his shirt so I’m just going to, you can actually check sit, look at mouth by pressing Slt in your mask.

And you can see what you’ve missed view fit on screen and you do this mask to get that way. And then Alt and click again to get it back. So now that we’ve done that let’s go ahead and check our blending mode to see what we can find a blending mode that we like better. So I’m putting it on normal and now I’m going to arrow down through all the different options.

Sometimes I don’t like extremely harsh grunge but I sometimes I like it kind of subtle. Actually I like this color brown one but I might like it just a slightly stronger. So what I’m going to do is I’m just going to duplicate the layer by dragging it on top. And then it actually I make it quite a bit stronger. So what I’m going to do is double click the layer and reduce the opacity.

So now we have some grunge around the picture. Now I just want to show you how to make you’re photo look a little bit more edgy. What we’re going to do is highlight our layer and then come up to filter, sharpen and sharpen mask. Now we have our un-sharpen mask up and you can increase or decrease.

This was the preset that I already had. You may want to increase and as you can see since the previous on you can see what’s it’s doing. It’s just making it a little bit edgier looking threshold. You can see what that does. I like it low, we don’t want to soft look here. We want it a little bit more harsh.

And that looks pretty good to me so I’m going to ahead and press okay. If you look at your history you can see the before and after or if you do undo and that’s all there is to it, so have fun with the grunge.

Male: Hey, that was easy. Thanks for watching. If you have any questions about this tutorial or any of our products you can always reach us at easydigitals.com. Have a creative day.