The basics.

The first thing you have to remember when working with textures, is that the results will vary depending on your photo, the texture you choose, and the blending mode you select.  You have to play with them a couple of times to determine the effect you like best.

First step is to open both your photo and the texture you want in an editing software that allows layering (PS, PSE, Gimp.  But not Lightroom unless you add a plug-in for it, and that’s a whole other story…).

Then you slide the texture over the photo with the move tool or by copy/paste.  You will have to adjust it’s size with the Move tool or the Free Transform tool so it fits perfectly your document.

I have to admit I love gradients in PS (or PSE).  I think it’s one of the neglected tools in your panel.  With gradients you can easily add fill light, contrast, haze, vignette, etc.  It’s easy to use, but you have to select the right gradient and the right blending modes to get the most out of them.

For this tutorial I’ll use a macro of a flower I did, on which I wanted to softly enhance the center.  Please keep in mind that my photo has it’s own color and exposure, yours will obviously be different,  so layer opacity and angle values (we’ll see it soon…) might need to be adjusted to your own image.  This serves only as a reference to make you want to use Gradients in your editing.

In a fantasy world,  I would own a fisheye lens,  but reality is,  I don’t.  So, whenever I want a little fisheye effect in my images,  I have to rely on Photoshop  (It will work in PSE too).   Here’s my photo,  before and after the Fisheye effect.

I’ve done smoke photography in the past, but never went further than capturing it and converting one image to a decent smoke trail.  This time around I wanted to combine different smoke trails in one image.  I loved the result so I decided to share the tutorial with you guys!

What you’ll need:
Camera (with pop-up flash activated or a speedlite to capture the elusive smoke)
Incense sticks
A large room with a black background,  or a black studio box kit if you plan on doing it inside.  I did it outside,  at night,  the smell of the dollar store bought incense was too strong to have it inside.  If you plan on shooting outside, choose a night without wind!

Here’s the tutorial for this underexposed image.  I could have only corrected the exposure, BUT if you know me, I could not leave it at that.  I needed to make something more, add my artsy touch to it.  So today I’m sharing this editing recipe,  complete steps whether you use PS or PSE,  you’ll get the same results.