Adding a textured background to an image

I wondered how many of you , like me, love to add textured backgrounds to your images.

There are some really lovely textures available or you may even have something that you have created yourself which would lend itself as an interesting but not too intrusive canvas background.

Remember, if your image is large you will also need a texture image large enough to fit and hopefully room to spare:)

I hope I have written it clearly enough for those of you who are relatively inexperienced in Paint Shop Pro

Perhaps it may help you think a little outside the square and experiment with some features that you haven't tried before :)

Below I will explain what I did with my particular image but really, playing with various textures and settings is the best way to learn.
You can download a PDF file of this tutorial HERE

In this particular case I wanted to blend my flowers into the background, rather than extract them precisely and place them "on top". This sort of method suits a flower such as a rose with a soft edged look.

This was a photo of one of my roses "Seduction" which I took on Friday morning early.[much reduced in size]

 The background certainly left a fair bit to be desired but I rather liked the various shades of colour that I had captured in the rose ...even if the composition wasn't marvellous either!

Sorting through my folders of textures I found one whose colour cast [blue] wasn't quite what I wanted but had the sort of painted surface look that I was after and it was a size that was sufficiently large.

[Some similar textures on my website HERE}

 I made a copy of my texture and closed the original. This I desaturated with the thought that it could be recoloured later, and rotated 90 degrees.

 I also copied my flower photo in Paint Shop Pro and worked on my copy retaining its original size and not bothering to crop it.

I promoted my background to layer [Layer> promote to layer ] and roughly selected the area that I wanted with a rectangular selection tool, then  inverted selection and deleted.

I then copied my modified texture and added it as a new layer to my flower before dragging this layer under my flower layer.

As you can see it is quite a lot larger than my canvas area which will allow me to move it around later if I wish, to get the piece of it that I want.

If your texture is a bit small you can stretch it into shape a bit . [as it is an abstract sort of image a bit of distortion isn't going to matter too much]

Now to work on flower layer.

I selected the layer with the flower image.

Layer> new mask layer hide all.

My flower disappears: 

 In the mask Layer group, I opened the layers within and reveal the actual mask and  worked on this.

Now with a large WHITE soft brush I worked from the centre of the image to reveal the flowers.

[Click on the image below to show my brush settings]

I worked towards the edges but concentrated mostly on the centre of the roses as I wanted to allow the edges to fade into the background.

I changed the blend mode of the layer group to soft light. and also linked all the layers within the group.[more of that later]

I then duplicated this layer group and changed the duplicated layer back to normal mode.

With my soft brush and BLACK fill opacity 50% I worked around the edges of my flower area on the mask to reveal a little less of the flower . {some of the edges on the layer below then appeared ..but softly. I lowered the opacity of this layer group to 80%

As you can see the centre of the rose needed boosting back to normal :)

I again duplicated my mask group and increased opacity of this layer group back to 100%

[I now had 3 flower layers all masked]

I carefully selected the mask layer in the topmost layer group.

This time I completely floodfilled my mask layer with black.

I then changed my foreground material back to white and working only the area with the stamens revealing that area [ again with a soft brush].

Zooming in to 40%

Now I turned my attention to recolouring my background.

After some trial and error [aka fiddling about :) ] :

Choosing a colour from my image I floodfilled a new layer above the background and changed the blend mode to burn.

I duplicated this layer and changed the blend to soft light.

This gave me a rather attractive pinkish tone to the background but I needed a little colour contrast.

 Green is always a safe choice with pink.

With a new layer , flood filled with a fading gradient of a soft green [blend "color"]

It wasn't quite "warm" enough for my liking so I added a new layer and  flooded with a light cream [blend mode soft light.]

I then adjusted the opacity of these layers to something I liked .

As you can see the colouring is still fairly subtle and doesn't overpower my flowers.

 Because I had linked all the masked flower layers I was able to move them together around my canvas with the move tool :)...very handy if I wanted to add any text.

The many layers left unmerged allowed a lot of potential for adjustment if I wasn't happy with the colour print out.

Also by giving myself so much canvas room, I had lots of cropping options available too.

Finally [click on image to enlarge]

Another version HERE

Judy

PS Some good links to textures --many free

http://www.mcpactions.com/blog/2009/12/17/texture-sites/

If you have any queries or suggestions please add a comment.:)

Tutorial - Joan's Woods-Co-ordinating tileable patterns

Fun tut for those who know their way around Paint Shop Pro. This tutorial requires plug-ins. I am assuming you have those but if not go to our PLUG IN links on left.

Take this simple picture of some woods (many thanks Joan for the great picture) - click on the pic to see full size, right click and save to your desktop.

Using your square selection tool choose a reasonably sized square, copy and paste as a new image.

Resize to around 300x300 px. Windows duplicate twice so that you have three separate squares. This is the basis of our play. Firstly we will make all our tiles then create finished papers.

1) With your first square duplicate the layer, flip and reduce opacity to 50 - this is to tone down the amount of light sky colour - merge all flatten. FM Tile tools, blend emboss at default. Then use Xero, Artifax with the following settings: 255/170/25/0/255
Add new layer and drag to bottom, fill with colour - I used #859fa0 - on top layer change opacity to suit you. Merge all flatten and save as .jpg tile 1.

2) Using your second square, Effects, Distorion Effects, Polar co-ordinates, rectangular to pole.
Use your deform tool to pull your image right of the sides to fill the square. Then use your crop tool around the square and delete from the edges to get rid of any polar left outside. Blur, gaussian blur 12. Add noise gaussian mono 5. Now DSB Flux, centre mirror at default. FM emboss, FM seamless tile at default. Save as .jpg tile 2.

3) Using your third square cut a little square piece out with no sky - effects, image effects, seamless at default. Save as .jpg tile 3.

Having fun? Let's go make our papers

Take your first saved jpg tile, minimize, open new image 600 x 600 (or whatever size you want). On your colour pallete select pattern and settings 0 50, fill. You may add texture or anything else you wish to this plaid. As it is a subtle colour it is very easy to recolour using hue and saturation.

Take your second saved jpg tile, minimize and select it in your pallete again, this time settings are 45 and 10. Open new image as above, flood fill with pattern, add a layer of the same soft green colour as earlier, reduced opacity to about 70 to tone with the plaid. Save this as your second paper.

For the third paper using your saved tile 3 use the tile as a pattern, open new image and fill with pattern, settings 45 and 50. Use FM emboss twice, add a new layer, fill with the soft green colour as earlier and reduce opacity to suit.

There you have three completely different papers from one image, all tone nicely. As we have used a soft colour each paper can be duplicated and coloured as often as you like.

Here are my papers with addition of a deer! You will notice that I coloured a paper also.

Hope you have enjoyed this play.


Obviously the tips we have given here can be applied to any picture.

Please take time to visit our main Touch of Class blogs. Links on the left.

Chris at Touch of Class