Textures and overlays

Placing a texture, and the 5 blend modes that do the work

Placing a texture with File > Place Embedded brings it in as a Smart Object, which matters because you will rescale it 3 or 4 times before you are happy and a Smart Object survives that without softening. Once it is in, the blend mode decides what part of it you keep.

The maths behind each of those is on the blend modes page, and one line of it is worth carrying here: Multiply cannot darken pure black and Screen cannot brighten pure white, so a dark texture on Screen or a bright one on Multiply will look broken when it is only being obedient. Flip the mode before you assume the file is wrong.

Why most overlays read as a filter, and the mask that fixes it

Most overlays read as a filter because they are applied at uniform strength across the whole frame, and uniformity is the one thing that never happens in the physical world. Real dirt collects in corners and crevices. A real light leak enters past one edge of the film gate, so it comes from one side and fades. Real paper grain is even, but the ink density sitting on it is not. An overlay that ignores the picture's own light is a sheet laid over the picture rather than something happening inside it, and that is the whole difference.

3 fixes, in the order that gives the most improvement for the least work:

1. Mask by the picture's own light. Hold Ctrl and click the RGB composite thumbnail in the Channels panel, which loads the highlights as a selection, then hold Alt and click the add mask button so the mask arrives inverted. The texture now lands in the shadows and stays off the bright areas, exactly as grime does.
2. Mask the subject out. Run Select Subject from the Contextual Task Bar, then paint or fill that area black on the texture's mask. A grunge texture running across somebody's eyes is the single loudest amateur signal in this technique.
3. Give the overlay a direction. Draw a black to white Gradient across the mask so the texture is strong at one edge and gone at the other, which is how a light leak, a water stain and a scratch pattern all actually behave.

Then check 2 numbers before you call it done. First, the overlay's grain must not be sharper than the photograph's own: a 3000 px dust scan laid over a 1200 px JPEG puts the sharpest detail in the frame on the dirt, which is the tell that dates the 2008 look more reliably than the vignette does. Second, if you use the same texture on more than 1 picture, run Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal on it, or the identical coffee ring in the same corner turns a set of images into a template.

Getting a texture onto a curved or angled surface

Getting a texture onto a surface that is not flat and facing the camera takes 1 of 3 tools, chosen by how much relief the surface has.

• Use Edit > Transform > Distort for a flat plane seen at an angle, such as a wall or a tabletop, dragging each of the 4 corner handles onto the corners of the surface.
• Use Edit > Puppet Warp for cloth, paper and anything irregular, dropping pins along the folds and pulling them into place.
• Use Filter > Distort > Displace for real relief, which is the only one of the 3 that makes the texture follow bumps it cannot see.

Displace needs a displacement map built first, and that map is a separate file:

1. Duplicate the base picture into its own document.
2. Convert it with Image > Mode > Grayscale.
3. Soften it with Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur at 2 to 4 px, so the map pushes on shapes rather than on noise.
4. Save it as a flat .psd, which is the only format the filter will accept.
5. Select the texture layer in the original document, run Filter > Distort > Displace, set both scale fields to somewhere between 5 and 15, and choose the saved file.
6. Set the texture to Multiply so the base's own shadows come through the new surface.

What goes wrong at step 3 is skipping it. An unblurred map displaces the texture by a different amount at every pixel, which shreds it into noise. What goes wrong at step 5 is scale: values above about 20 tear the texture apart on any surface with real contrast in it.

Textures over an architectural render

Textures over an architectural render work on the same Multiply principle as everything above, and the reason is the render itself. A clay or white model render already contains correct ambient occlusion and cast shadows, so a material laid on Multiply lets all of that show through and immediately sits in the scene instead of on it. A material pasted on Normal covers the shading and has to have it painted back by hand.

4 things separate a convincing render treatment from a student portfolio one, and none of them is the texture library:

1. Select by material ID. If the renderer wrote an object or material ID pass, run Select > Color Range on it and you get a perfect mask per surface with no manual cutting at all.
2. Match the scale physically. Work out how many courses of brick that wall should be and scale the texture to that number, rather than to whatever looks pleasant at the current zoom.
3. Match the perspective. Use Edit > Transform > Perspective and check the result against a guide dragged along a real edge in the render, since a texture at the wrong vanishing point is visible even to people who cannot say why.
4. Match the light on the entourage. Cut out people, trees and cars all you like, but if the sky is overcast at around 6500 K and the figures were shot in direct sun at 5500 K with hard shadows falling the other way, the composite fails on colour temperature before anyone looks at the building.

Crop and resize, because the texture has to fit

Crop and resize belong on this page because the order matters: size the photograph first, then place the texture, or you scale the grain along with everything else and lose the match you just built.

• Crop with the Crop Tool at C, setting the ratio in the Options bar. Untick Delete Cropped Pixels to keep the crop reversible, and tick the content aware option to fill the empty corners left when you straighten a horizon.
• Resize with Image > Image Size at Alt Ctrl I. The Resample checkbox decides everything: unticked, you are changing print dimensions and touching no pixels; ticked, you are inventing or discarding them.
• Add room around a picture with Image > Canvas Size at Alt Ctrl C, which is how you build a paper border rather than scaling the image into one.
• Set 300 ppi for print. For screen output the ppi field does nothing at all: the pixel dimensions are the entire story, and a file labelled 72 ppi is not lower quality than the same pixels labelled 300.

Where good textures come from, and what HD has to mean

The best textures are the ones you shoot, and the shoot takes about 20 minutes. Photograph a wall, a concrete floor, a sheet of watercolour paper, a window at dusk. Shoot straight on so there is no perspective to undo later, in flat overcast light so there is no built in shadow fighting your picture's shadows, and fill the frame. A set of 30 of your own textures will outlast every download because nobody else has them and they will not turn up on a competitor's homepage.

The label HD means nothing here, and the number that does mean something is simple: the texture's pixel dimensions have to be at least as large as the area it must cover. A 24 megapixel capture covers a full frame comfortably; a 1200 px download scaled up to fill a 6000 px wide photograph produces soft mush, and soft mush is precisely what reads as a filter. Where you do download, take the file from the author's own site or the vendor's own exchange and read the licence before it goes anywhere near client work.

PSD templates and mockups are the same idea inverted: the artwork slot inside them is a Smart Object. Double click its thumbnail in the Layers panel, paste your artwork into the tab that opens, save with Ctrl S, and close it, and the mockup redraws with all of its own shading and warping intact. One last judgement call: a texture that is really a shape, such as a logo, a stencil or a halftone pattern, should be rebuilt as vector rather than overlaid as pixels, which is covered on Turning an image into vector. The rest of these operations are indexed on Photoshop, operation by operation, and the masking they all depend on is worked through in Removing a background in Photoshop. If you have no subscription, the free routes are named on the free alternatives page, and the free tier described on Photoshop on a phone carries layers and masks, which is enough to place and mask a texture.

Where to go next

PHOTOSHOPPhotoshop, operation by operationPHOTOSHOPRemoving a background in PhotoshopHow to remove a background in PhotoshopPHOTOSHOPPhotoshop on a phoneWhat actually worksILLUSTRATORTurning an image into vectorTurning an image into vector with Image Trace