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Photographing & Scanning Textures

So this is, as I mentioned for sort of the arts and crafts segment of the And of course, you don't have to do this, but to me, if you're creating everything digitally, you know, could you open a new document and create some of the things that I'm going to scan in? Maybe. But to me, there are still things you can do with actual physical things, like painted pink brushes that would be so much harder to do. Especially since, ironically, we're trying to make a brush in photo shop that looks like a brush. Then why not, You know, use a brush and make paint that way, so we'll talk about that second. But I want to touch a little bit of we'll be talking later on about adding texture to our photos and one of things that I always say to people is, textures are everywhere. So when you're out walking with your camera or any, not even there your high end camera, your smartphone camera can even potentially do the trick and you see an interesting texture. And we touched a little bit before the break o...

f Now that I know what some of things like blend modes and the blended sliders conduce. Oh, I start looking at potential textures a little differently than just going. Oh, it's a brick wall or or it's a you know, a crack in the pavement and they quite literally or everywhere. And the good news is possible. Textures are everywhere. The bad news is you need a bigger storage device because if you're like me on 1 10 minute period, you can get so many that over there. And I found young people like people do photo walks. And when I used to go our lead photo walks, I'd always trying to think Where is an interesting place, scenery wise Now in the back of my head, I'm thinking and texture. So is anything that's got the word old, abandoned, weathered to me that's like prime material. But even things like I was teaching at a wonderful event called the Texas School a few years ago. It's a week long event, and we were doing a class specifically on Photoshopped compositing, shooting someone on a plane background and composited onto a different background. That was a weeklong class, which is a long time for a photo shop, so I had arranged ahead of time and one of them, probably the middle of the week. We go outside and shoot a person against just a plain wall to show you didn't need a fancy set up. So they were like, No, no, no, 12. 13 people in the class and we all went outside and I set up the shot, took a sample, one to make sure it was what I had mine, that each one was taking turns. At one point I looked around and other than the person shooting, every other person was standing there like this with their camera waiting their turn. And I was like, Whoa, time out. What do you doing? And they're like, Wait in my turn, I'm like, Look around you. There's all the stuff you could be photographing like textures and kind looking like what I'm like, just literally look down. Look at that wall. Look at all of a sudden, it was really cool around. Everyone was like down their hands and knees and like walking around going Oh, yeah, because once they realized that they kind of open there, Mind Phil. But more than I'm taking a photograph of this subject here They started looking around, and years ago I went on a photo workshop with a wonderful A couple of photographers and we were doing landscape photography. And one of the things they said is that the mistake a lot of landscape photographers make is they walk out somewhere and they put their tripod down. And that's almost like you put blinkers on. Now you're only looking this way because you put the tripod. So his suggestion is lay the tripod down and walk around and kind of look around. Go Oh, that's interesting. And I feel the same way with texture. So I want to show you this, Uh, this is when we were at this Texas school, so I'm gonna do like, a little mini slide show, and this is literally in probably a grand total of 20 minutes at the end of shooting outside. And as we walk through the hotel lobby back to the room we were weren't doing our class and these were the photographs that I took just very quickly, not even worrying terribly about camera settings because this was just no cracks in the pavement. Even going a little closer, I don't know what might use that for, but is we'll see. There are things where that kind of function will make better sense when you see some of the ways will make use of it. You know, tree bark, this kind of stuff I love when there's, like that kind of stained different levels of and that this is all within inches of each other. Just me shifting my direction slightly or zooming in, zooming out. They all look kind of similar but would act slightly differently with each one. I love anything with a crack in it. That's a different kind of a color shape, because that's gonna lend itself towards this kind of thing. And even things like this. This was a water fountain, and I just deliberately missed the focus because I just like the color tones in it and you can see, then their water is moving. This one actually move the camera little bit because I was trying to get I wasn't trying to make Let's make a pretty picture of water and a fountain because who cares? But to me, I was thinking my brain was in texture mode, so everything was doing okay So then we moved inside the hotel and again people were heading for the elevators, like hold on a second. Now, just cause you're inside doesn't mean, you know, you're you're finished and the photographer brains will still turn on. So they're like, I don't have my off camera flash that I didn't know we were shooting inside. I'm like, we're not shooting pretty pictures of people were gathering material. So even though your shutter might be on so slow a speed, you think it's gonna be all out of focus. Excellent. Because that's what we're doing at this point. We're not trying to do architectural photos to sell to the hotel. So this is walking through the hotel. Don't even know what that was. I can't remember now, but it's cool, and it's something I can use at some point. I don't know what I can remember what it is. This was some glass structure, like through in the restaurant where they had a light behind. So at first I deliberately out of focus and then tried to get more and focus. And again, I'm not sure I don't think I've used that yet, but it's sitting in this folder reading for an opportunity for me to try and even things like this. This was remember, Oh, flowers. This one, This one This was, Ah, big chandelier in the ceiling. So I have shot one underneath it, and then one of these because this one is actually going, you can't really tell. But it's the reflection, the table underneath the chandelier trying to get a different look. This is one of my favorite ones because most people look and say what that was actually in the elevator, deliberately taking an out of focus shot of the buttons you pressed in the elevator just because it introduces difference in color. And I don't want the detail of the numbers. I just want shapes that are vague that I can then turn into something and again standing on his own. You would think, Why would you ever keep that? That's because some of the techniques that I would use this for I know there's gonna lend itself well to that technique. When we get to that later, you'll see. So my point is showing all these is that nothing is a throw away. You know, if you're out shooting, you're trying to get a wonderful shot of this landscape and you blow it and the focus off. Don't throw it away. Put it in your other folder called Possible Cool Stuff that I can use later whatever you decide to call it. Because to me, everything has the potential unless it's just black because you missed completely. There's nothing or white then, no. But anything like these where there's just stuff in there, you know, I begin not even sure what that is. But even there, it's got a little bit of ah difference in color in there that I can potentially do something with. Now here's the one I never said, like the reflection in the table of those same life looks very different now than it did before. And none of these. My intention is to print these out in frame and put my wall. That's not what these air Fourth ease air specifically, and this is just one folder that I have of all these different textures. I don't think that was a fake fireplace or something. Not even sure. And sometimes I deliberately let me rephrase that I always deliberately missed the focus on purpose. I never do that by accident. But on those rare occasions when I do, it still works out because I'm not looking for sharp texture all the time. If I have it, great, here's some old wallpaper. I love this one because it's it would take me so long and photo shop to try and replicate that. I was just a ballroom that had deliberately kind of a weathered look to it. Yeah, some of these aren't even sure carpet other weird stuff. Like I said, the downside is you gonna need more storage for all this stuff that you take photos. But that's just to give you the point. That wasn't This is not a collection I put together over the years. This was a probably 20 minute period on one afternoon just to demonstrate the fact that I'm not kidding when I say textures are everywhere. A few years ago, when my son was graduating from college, I went upto help him move his stuff back. And he had one last interview with a professor and he was in the graphic department. He said, If you want, just look around. It was actually a really amazing campus where Frank Lloyd Wright, famous architect. He was in Lakeland, Florida. So I took my camera, take photos of the buildings because I'm like, Hey, this is cool architecture. But then he was like, I'm gonna be right over here. And as we walked through, there was this area that the fine artists who do sculpture and it was all rusted metal and copper down like, I'll be right here and I just sat there for the next hour. Going This is like heaven. There's like, all the stuff that they were experimenting. Someone was there throwaway stuff because they couldn't use it. But it was big enough for me that I could zoom in and I had a lens at that point that kept slipping. But that actually create interesting effect, cause it created kind of this zoom focus thing that I didn't intend. I mean, that I meant to do, and it looked even better than I expected. So the lesson there is all anywhere you go. I mean, it doesn't matter where it is, and they don't have to worry about perfect lighting. That's not the point. If it's out of focus, sometimes that works even better. So I will often take two or three versions of the same thing where I deliberately try to, you know, go off automatic focus and make sure it's a little out of focus because that will again lend itself better to the technique. So whether you have your high end camera or any camera, then that's kind of the point of this conversation. Is all these textures. So personally, I shoot all of these in raw? Just so again, when I go to the next step of bringing the photo shop, I have such a range of possibilities. I might end up using one small part of it to make a pattern where I might use it as an overlay texture. We'll get to those things later on about what we do with these, but I want to start this topic off with thing. Can you buy textures? Other places? Sure you can, But even what I challenge people do is walk around your own neighborhood that you've walked around 1000 times walking your dog, and I'll betcha you find a hole when you start putting your texture thinking cap on instead of your photographer. I want to frame this in my living room hat. You won't find much in your neighborhood, probably. But if you just think textures and shapes and colors and things like that to me, that just it's a wealth of stuff just waiting for in this folder. I have 61 photographs in that 20 minute period. I probably used a dozen of them, maybe, and others are still sitting, but I'm kind of aware of it sitting in the back of my head. So if I open a photograph, this is one of the folders. I'll take a quick look at and go. Oh, that would probably work. And of course, we have to remind ourselves some of the photographs. And here are landscape orientation summer portrait. When it comes to textures, it doesn't matter because you just turn it around whatever angle you need. So you don't have to worry about a duel. Should I take, you know, different angles or whatever. You can easily do that part yourself. Okay, so that's the first thing Now the second thing is, you can also be a lot more formal about it. If you have lighting, you know you can set up a studio capture area where you put your camera on a stand and take photos of particular things. That's certainly another option today we're using a scanner because frankly, it's easier because we mean we could have set up a little table top with a couple of lights and a camera that I have toe tether capture, and you can certainly do all that part. But for this demonstration, we're gonna go old school and do it with a scanner just because it's a little easier. And for anyone under the age of 25 a scanner was a device we used to use. Some people are like, Yes, continue on in the good old days. So here's what I did. I give you the full scoop on the entire cost of this operation. I went into Walmart, I mean a well known big box store, and bought a pad of white paper that was like 3 or something. And I bought a couple of things of paint that were 97 cents each, black and gray, and I had a A bigger brush at home is one of those $3 brushes you get from your hardware store that you intend to just throw away cause it's cheap and a set of brushes I bought from that same WalMart for probably $4. So basically, I was like, well, under $20. And then I just sat there in a about 1/2 an hour and just started painting things, so I'm not gonna do it live. But I took my paint and went squish and then took my brush and just kind of squished it around a little bit and said, You know, this is a design. And again, I'm thinking ahead, too, knowing what I'm gonna do with it in photo shop. So therefore, I kind of was had an idea in mind that I wanted to be mostly black in the middle with the edges going out because I'm looking at this and thinking layer mask on a layer mask. Black hides things white shows them. So you have to put on your inverse glasses and think pretend this was the other way round that it was white in the middle and black on the outside, but it was cheaper to buy white paper in black paint than the other way around. So in my head, I was painting this thinking. Eventually it's gonna go into photo shop in one of the ways all uses as something to put on a layer mask. So I have a bunch of these that look like this with kind of solid areas with a bunch of little lines and then a whole lot more that are all kinds of variations on that theme. I won't show you all of them, but just different things. Some, ERM or water calorie and other shapes will stroke type things. And again, I don't I don't have a very specific plan to say, You know, these need to look a certain way. This was the experimental part of the things. I was just doing different brush strokes. I was deliberately, in his case, trying to get that kind of dry brush, fade out things I thought that would look interesting. Some of them now there. One thing that didn't really work the way that I had imagined. I was trying to get, like, water or paint splats. But the paint was so thick that I took me a long time to try and make like this if it was drooling down. But for example, on here this was a handful, but each one of these Aiken eventually individually turn into a brush without too much effort. So this whole thing was just a matter of a few minutes of just experiment, and I'll show you some other variations in a minute. But let's just go through and I'll scan one in and describe what we're gonna eventually do with it. At the same time, I'm going toe to save space. Now, what I want to do is I want to capture this pretty big. Um, my initial thought was so Therefore, I should capture it in a shade of gray, which I could do to to say, file size. But I might want to incorporate it in some other ways. So depends on file size. You mean I'm gonna just go with black and white? In this case, this particular scanner software has, ah, a place where you can see, you know, do a quick pre scan to make sure you're scanning the whole thing. I would even in cases like the ones that have a whole bunch of images on it, I would still do one scan of this and then individually separate them out So I'm gonna do this lower quality for our purposes because no one really wants to sit here and listen to the scanner buzz for the next few minutes. But so I've done a few ahead of time. I want to show you kind of the process for this and throughout this whole thing, I'm and with practice, everyone else will be able do this. I'm already thinking ahead to what's gonna look like in photo shop, and sometimes it's the opposite or inverse of what what I'm doing here, because it's just easier to do that. So I have a folder here. So here's what I just scanned in. So if I open that up now with any if you use your camera and do lighting or with the scanner scanners are good, but it's not the world's best scanner, so I can already see areas where the light was a little off. For example, up here we look in this corner that should be pure white, but it looks a little gray ish to me. So before I actually use this anyway, I want to do a little bit of tweaking to it and the way I would do that very simply would be to add a levels adjustment layer and I want to do is make sure the background around this shape is white, and the middle part is at least mostly black. And just by the nature there's going to be maybe a fuel shades of grey. So the simplest way to do that and you can use levels or curves for this. In this dollar box, there are three eye droppers. So I take the white eye dropper and I click over on this gray shirt and say that really should be white. And then it readjusts everything to say. Now it's white. If I still see, maybe down here looks to me like it's still not quite the way I want. So you have to kind of find the right spot. And then I take the black eye dropper and click on a solid black and saying that really should be black because I wanted at least to start off being pretty close to pure black and pure white. And then I would save this a way to to use later on someone's do that real quick, using really clever names like Scan six I'm sure will help me later on when I'm like What the heck is that? So needless to say, we could scan all of these sorts of things. I did want to show you one other idea. I'm not sure how well the camera's gonna pick this one up, but later on, we're gonna talk about trying to turn your photograph and make it look like a painting and all the techniques that I've seen. The one thing that I feel like was missing was an actual brush texture, because that's really hard to emulate. So I took this gray paint and I painted on really, really thick and then took a smaller brush that a whole bunch of little brush strokes to try and add this little bit of texture to it. And the only thing that I don't like about it is this paint was little glossier than I I would have liked because it's got a little bit of a shine, which when I tried to photograph it, it didn't photograph as well because he's picking up a lot of the light, so hopefully only scan it. It'll look a little bit better, but the purpose of this one is specifically to use for those situations where you're trying to make a photograph look like a painting and you want to emulate those brush strokes. So once back here and this one, I'm gonna we'll just keep the same settings so needs to say, Like I said, you could do all this with camera with lighting or not. I'm just using a scanner cause it's easier in this set up. But there's one other reason we'll talk about in a second as to why we're doing it this way as well. Hang and then see that one. So if we look more closely at it, well, that worked pretty well. See how you can see, like the little highlights and things from the the texture that I tried to create using the brush So this want to go long? Does that leave? Let it sit for like, a whole day, so dry properly because the pain was so thick. But to me, that's an investment in time that now we'll have this on my machine, and I can use it forever and ever because I had to do it once. Sorry, data, which is the different with the filter gallery and which you have kind off painted. That kind of think they're the problem and we'll talk more about using some of the films in the filter gallery. But there's there isn't filter that I found yet that gives this kind of feeling of texture. It tends to be a very repetitive like If you look really closely, it looks like it's taken ah, square texture and repeated over and over again so that it doesn't quite look as natural. This is when we see it in use. You'll see if I'm scanning it big enough that it's going to cover the entire photo instead of being repeated over and over again. So it tends to look more natural and people have tried, and the technique I use uses mostly filters. But this is sort of the last finishing touches to say. Now we have this put this over the top to make it look even more realistic. OK, so we'll come back to those later on. So the other thing that an idea and this goes back there was a book that I probably still have somewhere from like I can remember I wanted it was Photoshopped to or something, and it was called design Essentials. And it was talking about ways to use photo shop and illustrator and make interesting art. And one of the ideas they had is Teoh make kind of a grungy looking text to use for different things. And this was now, mind you today, you could probably go on to a couple sites and find a zillion fonts that have that look. But again, it's still not unique. I want something that's unique to me. So I never forgot this idea. And I thought it was really interesting Is you take a really, um, skinny Sharpie type pen Could be even skinnier than this. Probably. I don't know where the best place where can you see what I'm doing here? I'll tell you what I'm gonna do first, whatever word I'm in it, like, say, I'm doing something where I want to create a thing for, like, a high school senior. So I'm going to write the word senior as small as I possibly can. I mean, teeny, tiny like, to the point where you can't read it. This is probably a little thicker than they have even skinnier one but we'll do it anyway. And I do not have good writing. I'll tell you that right off, which actually works better in this case. So I'm just gonna do it a couple of times. Okay? So you can see teeny tiny print and again, the the sharper the point you can get, like it could even use a ballpoint pen. Probably black, though, and do really, really skinny little writing. So you write whatever words you might think you're gonna use in your design. Thank. And again, you could do this photographically with cameras. Well, but since we're doing scanner will do it that way. Okay, so in this case, I don't want to scan the whole pace I'm gonna do. Most scanners have an ability, like an overview where you can see what's on the scanner bed and then just identify. I just want to select this one little portion of it because there's really no point be scanning the whole thing, But I'm gonna scan it as pretty much as high as I possibly can. And again only black and white, cause that's all they need. So we can or in should have, like, jeopardy music or something playing all the scanners going, but it's actually not that long. Still working on it that finished? Sorry, I'm jumping back in port to see if it's finished or not. Um, still scanning my bad. Sorry, It's taking longer, I guess, because I'm going in such a high resolution. So the idea behind this is your printing. It is teeny tiny as you can because we're going to scan it so big effectively, it's gonna blow it up to a much bigger size. But parts of it are gonna be missing. And it look kind of have that grungy edge because whenever you blow something up, it tends to lose a bit of quality, which is exactly what we want in this case. So you can use this theory for anything. For example, you could take that same Sharpie and just do a few lines with it. So when you scan it in now, that line is gonna be calm or broken up and have become a design element that use so again, My thought process here is to show you ideas. So then you can say, what else can I do with that? So this concept of starting really tiny and scanning and blowing it up. Normally, you'll hear me say all the time when I'm teaching Photoshopped we never want to blow something up, make it bigger and photos all because you lose quality. This would be the exception to that rule because were deliberately trying to have it lose quality. We're not trying to make beautiful thought were trying to make it look like unusual, you know, writing or whatever it might be OK, I think we've effectively wasted enough time. All right, so let's see, we got so I went wrongly. I'm horrible at clockwise counterclockwise. I'd like the worst person in the world to bring that out So you can see how if I had a skinnier pan, it would have been even better. Probably. But you get the idea that now it looks like you can actually see some of the the pen bled into the texture of the paper a little bit. So I'm not getting that perfectly smooth edge because I don't want it to be. And now I could either take this and turn into a brush, or I could leave it as is and say I'm going to just bring it into a photo shop and may be used. Blend if sliders to make it blend in. So let's do this 1st 1 real quick here, I'm gonna copy this, make a new document and paste it. And then let's open a photo, no matter what it is. But let's do one of these. This one. And I'm just doing this really fast to show part of the idea of why we would want to do this. I make it even bigger now. So it's gonna look even grungy here, inverted. Maybe because I want the text to show up a little better and then use my blended sliders here to start to blend it in. Now, we didn't try this ahead of time. If I did, I would have picked us skinnier pen. But just to show you the thought process behind it, that's kind of the end end ideas. So this is exactly how I would do it. So let's pretend we plan this perfectly with our thicker pen because now I've done that. A gay Okay, note to self. Next time, use a skinnier pan and maybe make the letters a little bigger so I can still see the like, the hole in the E and stuff like that. But that's each time you're doing this, you're gonna learn something different and pick up a different idea that you didn't have before. So that's kind of where this thought processes that anything you can turn into some design element. And to me, nothing is a throwaway. This didn't work quite like I expected or hoped, but I could still turn into something and try something, and maybe it'll turn into something completely different. I don't know, but that's part of why I wanted to do this. Live is to show you. So it wasn't all pre done. Look at all these things I scanned in previously. That's exactly what might happen is you look at and go, and that didn't quite work that I wanted. But now I know next time, maybe use paper. That's our should say, the pen that's really skinny or used a ballpoint pen or whatever, but that's kind of the idea of what we're trying to achieve here.