Textures in Photoshop | Masking the texture but keeping the colour

Texture overlays have become extemely popular with portrait and wedding photographers over the last year or two. Obviously, it doesn’t suit every image but on the right image the results can look fantastic. By using different types of textures on you can create a wide variety of looks from simple toning to completely destroying an image with scratches and grunge.

There are literally thousands of tutorials on “How to add texture overlays in Photoshop” so I don’t feel it necessary for me to add another one, but I did want to share a quick technique I often use to mask away texture from important areas of the image such as faces, skin and clothing. The thing I like most about this is that unlike the other methods (masking, lowering opacity, eraser tool etc) this technique keeps the colour and ‘feel’ that the texture adds to your image. I’ve chosen to use a black & white image for this tutorial as I thought it would illustrate how this method retains the texture colour a little better than a colour image would.

1. Add your texture and choose your preferred blend mode. With this particular image I’ve used the Multiply blend mode. This texture doesn’t look too bad on this image. I really like the ‘stained’ colour but I think there’s maybe a little too much texture on the skin. I could lower the opacity of the texture but the colour would reduce also, not the effect I’m really after.

2. Duplicate the texture layer and set the blend mode to ‘normal’. With the duplicate texture layer selected choose Layer > Create Clipping Mask. You can also ‘option’ or ‘alt’ click between the layers to do this – but I couldn’t figure out how to take a screenshot of this method

3. Run a Gaussian Blur filter on this duplicate layer, just enough to reduce any significant detail in the texture.

4. Click the little ‘Add Vector Mask’ icon at the bottom of the layer palette and fill with black or choose Layer > Layer Mask > Hide All.

5. With a soft brush paint with white over any areas of your image that you want to erase texture. With any areas you don’t want to completely remove the texture you could just lower the opacity of your brush.

As you can see the skin is clear of texture but still retains the ‘stained’ colour. There are still a few areas that I would work on further, a few patches of darker colour around the jawline and on the neck, but I could fix this easily by cloning or healing on the blurred texture layer.

As I said previously, there are thousands of great tutorials about blend modes and textures in Photoshop. If you want to learn a little more about this then I would highly recommend the tutorials over at Chromasia. As well as having one of the most comprehensive tutorials on working with textures I’ve seen there’s a wealth of other great stuff.

There are also millions of free textures available online. Personally, I’d recommend shooting some of your own but to get started check out Lost And Taken. This is a fantastic resource.