Adding Texture in Photoshop

Photoshop lets you add lots of interesting textures to your images, such as the cracked canvas effect generated by the Craquelure filter (see Figure 2-14), or the pixel effect produced by the Patchwork filter. Find these filters at Filter➪Texture. You’ll find other filters in this menu to help you create mosaic effects, add yet another kind of film grain, and create stained-glass effects in your images.

Introducing the Texturizer
The most versatile filter in this set is the Texturizer. Choose Filter➪Texture➪Texturizer to bring up the Texturizer dialog box. The Texture filter enables you to apply various kinds of textures to your images or selections, including Canvas, Sandstone, Burlap, or Brick. You can choose the relative size of the texture compared to the rest of your image by using the Scaling slider, and govern the 3-D relief effect. You can even select the direction of the light source that produces the 3-D look, choosing from top, bottom, either side, or any of the four corners of the image. If those variations aren’t enough for you, create your own texture, save it as a Photoshop PSD file, and use that to texturize your image. You’ll find a handful of other filters that allow you to load your own (or someone else’s) textures, including Rough Pastels, Underpainting, and Conté Crayon.

Looking at the Other Filters
The Video and Other categories are where you might expect to find oddball filters that don’t fit very well anywhere else. However, given that Adobe tends to sprinkle oddball filters anywhere it likes anyway, it’s no surprise that the Other category is the home of the oddest of the odd. For example, the Other submenu is home to the Custom filter which is no filter at all but rather a dialog box with a matrix in which you can type numbers that Photoshop uses to process the pixels in your image in unexpected ways. The results will be surprising, especially if you don’t have a fairly intimate knowledge of how Photoshop filters work.

The center box in the matrix represents a pixel in your image; the surrounding boxes represent the pixels that surround that pixel. The numbers you type tell Photoshop whether to darken or lighten pixels. You can experiment to see what will happen, and if you like the effect, tell all your friends that you meant to do that. The High Pass filter, also found in the Other category, applies an effect opposite to the Gaussian Blur filter. It finds and keeps the details in the edges where it finds distinct color or tonal differences and turns the rest of the image gray. When converting a continuous-tone image into a bitmap (black and white only) image, applying this filter is useful before applying the Threshold adjustment. It is also handy when creating a channel mask.

Two other filters that help in the masking arena are the Minimum and Maximum filters. The Minimum filter expands the black areas while decreasing white areas (known as choking in traditional photography). The Maximum filter expands the white portions while decreasing black areas (known as spreading). The radius value you enter tells the filter how many pixels to expand or decrease from the edges of your selection. The Video menu contains its own share of strange filters, including the NTSC Colors filter, which performs the rather obscure function of converting all the colors in your image to match the colors used for television reproduction. (NTSC stands for National Television Systems Committee.) You’d use this filter to process digital presentations or slides to be shown on television, if you were really, really particular about how the colors are portrayed.