Many photographers are incorporating various textures into their photographs. By “incorporating” I mean blending a photo of a certain texture with a photograph. The most basic way to achieve it, is to load your photograph and the texture as two layers into single file in Photoshop, place the texture layer on top of the photograph layer, and change the blending mode of the texture layer until you find something that you like (or something that helps you to achieve the look you are going for). After that you can mask out various areas of the texture layer as you see fit, and also play with the opacity of this layer. This is a very brief explanation, and most of the times to achieve acceptable results more actions are needed.

Recently I had an idea for an image, and for that I needed a certain texture, which I didn’t have.  I started looking for it online and I was surprised to find so many textures for free download. There was one catch though – most of those textures were available in a very low resolution, much lower than the photograph that I wanted to apply it to. I had two options – either to stretch that texture to match my photo, or to use it several times as tiles. Either of these options wasn’t good enough for me, so I decided to shoot my own texture and went out for a walk.

Wandering around my neighborhood and looking for a texture that would suit my needs I saw so many differently textured objects that I decided to create my own high-resolution texture library.

And since I like to share, here is the first texture pack for you to download for free! 

Right-click on the image above and choose “Save As”

This texture pack contains three high-resolution files of green shrubs in various scales. Here is an example how I used one of them:

Click on the photos to enlarge.

I’ll be honest with you, achieving this result wasn’t as simple as the steps that I described above. In addition to those steps I also performed color correction (to match colors of the texture and the model), used two layers of the texture with different blending modes for background and the dress, added light and vignetting.

I hope you’ll find this texture pack useful and feel free to ask me any questions in the comments section below.