Still Life Texture Tutorial – #1
NOTE: This tutorial was written some time ago, not to mention I was using Photoshop 3 at the time! Even though there may be easier ways to do some of the tasks here, hopefully a look into the overall process is still interesting and hopefully will also encourage you to experiment with the tools and experiment with your textures! I think its more fun to just play and be creative then be completely surprised with the beauty of your final artwork!
I had taken the starter photo a couple weeks ago in my kitchen. I had a piece of soft white fabric as a backdrop, the overhead florescent kitchen light was on, one of those “fake sun” lamps people use for crafting was positioned on the left along with a large piece of white paper, and a large sheet of black paper was positioned on the right.
The first thing I noted about this photo was that there was a very hard light on the right (where my lamp was) that needed to be adjusted at some point.
The next thing I noticed was the fabric… I wish I had more of it but I didn’t, so the next best thing would be to blend the fabric with the white paper in Photoshop. The rubber stamp tool was used to remove the hard edge of the fabric and blend the white paper and fabric to look like one continuous piece.
Okay, that was set! I also decided that wanted the overall image a bit darker, so I duplicated my image, placed it on a new layer above the original and set that layer to Multiply and set the Fill to 63%.
The next thing I did was select one main texture to enhance the background.
I wanted a texture that was very noticeable and I only wanted that texture in the background.
I selected the texture then used the magic wand in Photoshop to select only the fabric. With the selection still active, I selected inverse from the menu to reverse what I had selected, now the pots were now selected, then I deleted the texture from the pots.