How to Use Textures and Photo Veils to Enhance an Image

It’s Friday, and for me, that usually means Fix It Friday time! Each Friday I Heart Faces shares a picture that you can edit any way you like, then link up at their site and go visit others to see how they edited the same image.

Here are my preliminary steps:

• Level’s adjustment, pulling the black slider in a good bit to bring out some contrast.
• B&W Gradient Map set to Luminosity, and lowered to about 40% opacity.
• Flatten.

Then, to add light, color and hue to the picture, I decided to add a couple of photo veils from Love That Shot

• Go to File, Open, navigate to my Textures folder, then to my Veils folder, and pick the veil I want.
• Go to the Project bin and click on the picture I’m working on.
• Activate my move tool (v on your keyboard) and then locate the veil in the project bin.
• Drag the veil onto the picture and size to the image.
• Change the layer blend mode to Overlay or Soft Light.
• Reduce layer opacity to suit image.

Below shows the two veils I used.

After I added the photo veils, I decided I wanted a texture or two.

• Navigate to my Textures folder, open the one I want.
• Open Project Bin and click on the image I’m editing again.
• Find the texture in the Project Bin and drag it onto the image, size to fit.
• Change the blend mode to Overlay or Soft Light.
• Repeated steps with another texture.
• Used a soft, low opacity eraser brush to brush off some of the texture from the boy.
• Note: I used one texture from Love That Shot and one texture from Shadowhouse Creations

My last step was to add some soft pop and depth:

• Duplicate layer, Filters, Blur, Gaussian Blur, radius 20.
• Set layer blend mode to Soft Light and reduced layer opacity to suit.
• Grabbed eraser brush, set to 30% brush opacity, and brushed off his face and some of foreground.
• Flatten.

Below is my Before/After comparison and a run down of what I used.