This is actually pretty easy and I am going to show you how to do it on your own in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, and I even wrote a nifty action that does some of the work for you. I will tell you when you start using the action in the tutorial.
CoffeeShop Portrait Give It Texture Tutorial:
1. Open your image. Then open your texture. For this tutorial I used a beautiful texture called Renoir from the Chasing Dreams France set. Colleen has gorgeous textures and I love her new Summertime collection.
2. Select your move tool (V) and left click on your texture and hold down the button and drag the texture on top of your image. Ctrl-T (free transform) it to fit over your entire image . Unclick "Constrain Proportions" in PSE or unselect maintain aspect ratio (top menubar, looks like a little link) in Photoshop if it is not the same shape as your image.
3. Put the texture layer in multipy blending mode and adjust opacity to taste. You can always tweak it later. I love using textures in multiply mode in portraits, especially when the image has areas that are very light, so the texture is more obvious. If you add textures only in soft light or overlay blending mode, light areas usually don't show any texture and the image can have too much contrast. I love the combination of multiply and soft light/overlay with textures.
4. Add a layer mask to the texture layer. If you have PSE8 or older, download my free Layer Mask Action. Do not forget this step or the action will not work!!!
5. Select your lasso tool (L) and adjust the feather to taste (I used 10 on this high resolution image). Make sure you added the layer mask BEFORE doing this step! If you aren't familiar with this selection tool, you will see a few boxes on the top menubar that look like this:
First click on new selection and zoom in some and start selecting the area you want to remove the texture (skin and shirt in this case). Once you have the selection, you can click on add to selection to add areas you missed, and click on subtract from selection to remove areas. Try to take your time and do an accurate job, especially if you are printing a large image.
6. Once you have finished selecting areas where you need to remove the texture, start the CoffeeShop Portrait Give It Texture action and it will finish the edit for you (see image below). Adjust the two texture layers blending modes/opacities to taste. If you don't want to use the action or are curious what is happening, read on!
7. To get the results in the image above without using the action, click to select the texture (not the texture layer mask) and Filter, Gaussian blur the selection. Adjust the Gaussian blur slider until you don't see any texture on the skin. Then click on the layer mask and edit, fill with 50% gray. This removes 50% of the texture color from your selection. This way your skin will have some of the texture color but still retain some original skin color.
Ctrl-J (copy) this layer and put this layer in overlay or soft light blending mode. Then adjust both texture layer's opacities to taste. Now your skin will be texture-free yet still retain some of the color from the texture.
Here are some examples using the action/tutorial. I used textures from Chasing Dreams, FlyPaper, and Florabella. I don't think it is possible to have too many textures. My favorite place to go for free textures is ShadowHouse.
I hope you enjoy playing with textures. I have many other CoffeeShop texture tutorials, so please check them out.
Download the free CoffeeShop Portrait Give It Texture action.
Want all of my favorite CoffeeShop Actions in one simple download AND help support this blog? Just click here for more information! For complete info on installing all of my actions, click here.
