In part 1 of this tutorial, I showed you how to add texture to a photo. (If you haven’t tackled that yet, it might be helpful to you to check that out first). Here I’m going to show you how to add a texture and lessen the effect of it on our subject using a layer mask.

So first open your picture.

Next choose your texture and drag it on top of your picture (resizing it to cover the picture) and choose your blending mode (“overlay” is used for this example). I chose a texture from Stock.xchng that you can download here.

This is a cool texture for the background of the photo, but it’s leaving the skin of my subject mottled and super weird looking. I could just put a layer mask on the texture and mask it out, but what happens then is that I lose the color of the texture over the areas that I mask, which would cause the boy to be a different color than the rest of the picture, (which you can get away with sometimes depending on the color of the texture, but many times you really want to keep the color of the texture, but lessen it’s impact on certain parts of your image).

So what I’m going to do first is set the blend mode of my texture layer back to normal and opacity at 100%. I’m then going to take my eyedropper tool (“I” key) and sample the dominant color of the texture.

Picking the right color out is a judgment call… but if you find later on that it’s making your picture darker or lighter than it should be, you can go back and make the color of this layer a little darker or lighter to compensate.

Once you’ve got your color, create a new layer (ctrl+shft + n) and fill it with the foreground color that you just sampled (Alt+Backspace). Next, in the top right of your layers palette, click the menu and choose “Make clipping mask” from the menu (or you can hit alt+cntrl+g) and put a clipping mask on the color layer you just created.

Ok, now go back to your texture layer, reset the blending mode (and opacity) you had previously (in this example “overlay” @ 100% opacity). You’ll notice that all of your texture has disappeared.

To bring the texture back we need to place an inverse layer mask on the color layer. You can do this by clicking the “add layer mask” icon at the bottom of your layers palette while holding your “alt” key down.

VERY NICE. Your texture should be back. Now we need to paint some of that texture out. Making sure that the layer mask on the color layer is selected (click on it if it’s not) grab your brush tool (B) and set your brush to the desired size, softness and opacity. I used a size of 150, 0% hardness, 60% opacity.

Choose white as your color and with the brush paint over the areas where you want to take texture out. The higher the opacity of the brush, the more texture you take out.

Wicked!!  Mask out the texture to taste, and VOILA, all of the color with toned down texture. If you turn the visibility off on your color layer and notice a change in the color of your document, experiment with filling the layer with a lighter / darker color until the color layer isn’t changing the tonal appearance of the photo.

Finally, if the texture is creating a color cast that is too strong for your taste, try experimenting with a “selective color” adjustment layer at the top of your layers to tone color down a bit.

And that’s it.  The right texture can give a photo a little extra POW and creative zip.

Enjoy experimenting with texture!

Before Texture

Texture Partially Masked

Related posts:

1. Adding Texture to a Picture In Photoshop (Part 1)
2. Photoshop CS4 Brush Shortcuts
3. All the Nice Without the Plastic
4. The Reality of Google Wave
5. Photo Denied on IStock Photo