How To Make Your Own Photo Textures

Why Making Your Own Textures Is Important

Often times finding textures on the internet will mean that they come with a few restrictions. The biggest restriction is often resolution. Very few textures are at a high enough resolution to fit on a full size image without being scaled up. Scaling a photo up too far can really take away a lot of the details that make textures nice in the first place. The second restriction is copyright. If you do not own the texture you place over your image, you can get in trouble legally, and that is not a place we want to be in. Be sure to credit the person who provided the texture if you do choose to use one you have found online.

How to Make Your Own Photo Textures

If you make your own textures, you can make them as high resolution as you want, and you own the copyright to the images. It is a win win situation, and we cover the entire process.

Start out by looking for organic materials, things like stone, fibers, wood, metals. All of these have surfaces with will interact with light differently, producing different effects. The biggest thing to look for in choosing your subject material will be the difference between darks and lights. If you want to add subtle cracks to your image, look for dark cracks on light pavement. If you want to add sparkle, look for small light flecks of stone in a dark granite countertop.

These stark contrasts between dark and light make the process of texturing much easier, because you will be able to use blending modes to do most of the work for you.

What You Will Learn

• 0:30 – Intro to our 2 part series on making and using your own textures
• 1:00 – Defining texture
• 1:20 – Artist Highlights Rosie Hardy & Brooke Shaden
• 1:50 – Where to find good textures online
• 2:30 – Issues with using other people’s textures
• 3:10 – What to look for in making a texture
• 4:10 – Exposure compensation when photographing textures
• 6:00 – Taking Photos and explaining blending modes
• 7:20 – Help focusing on dark subjects
• 8:00 – Alternate places to photograph textures
• 9:00 – Challenge to make texture library