Adding textures to paintings and photographs is as old as these art forms. This article focuses on artistic aspects of Texture Blending, starting with a brief overview.

Texture Blending Overview
With film, photographers created texture blended images by exposing multiple times with different textures and the main images. It could also be done by creating sandwiches of different negatives or blending in camera. Today the process is much easier to control by using Photoshop.

The idea is to blend a picture with one or more textures and let the result become more than the sum of the photos used. For us, Texture Blending is always an exploration process. This is done primarily by utilizing Photoshop’s Blending Modes to blend the images. Texture Blending in not a mechanical process. Experimentation is key, and we always try to get surprised. You will learn that good textures are as important as your so-called main images. We create new textures all the time by photographing, collecting from the web (always respecting copyrights) and Texture Blending of textures. It is not easy to get textures of a good resolution. Sometimes texture resolution does not matter, but then in other cases it does. Making textures smaller is easy, but you cannot create artificial resolution.