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Using lighting effects with the texture fill
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Using Lighting Effects With Texture Fill:
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1.
So you want to apply
texture to an image? There's at least two ways to go about this. The easiest is the
Texturizer Filter. But the one with the most control and, therefore, potential is filling an image with a texture via the Lighting Effects filter. It is one of those things that you can kill hours by. The possible combinations of images & textures & light effects can keep you glued to the monitor for quite a while.
In a nutshell here's how it works: You pick an image to use as a texture. (Most of the time this is a real texture, such as wood or bricks or whatever. In the examples to the left, I used an actual photographic image, of the mother and child.) Next you pick an image to apply the texture to. (In my example I created a new file with the same dimensions as Mom & kid, and used the Clouds Filter on it.) Then you create a new Alpha Channel and put your "texture" there. Finally, you apply the Lighting Effects Filter and mess with its settings. Click OK and ta-da!
You can see how the clouds image is altered. The Mommy and Baby have sort of been embossed on it. It's kind of scary in places, but definitely a cool effect. Remember back in Art class when you took a wood skewer and pressed into a piece of thick aluminum foil to create an embossed drawing? Maybe that was just me. Anyway, that's what it reminds me of.
Let's learn more about this effect! |
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2.
I've got this bitchin' photo of this bitchin' car just aching to be messed with.
The first thing I do is go to the Channels Palette, and click this icon  on the bottom to create a new alpha channel. You can give it a name if you want. At this point the channel is filled with black. So I take the text tool  and create some white text ("Corvette") at the bottom. (What I'm doing here is creating my own "texture" that will be applied to the image in a bit. If you've already got a texture file made, you should select Filter: Render: Texture Fill... and then navigate to the Photoshop file. Then the channel would be filled with a grayscale version of it. I'll actually get around to using more traditional textures later.) Of course rather than type in the alpha channel you could paint, draw shapes with the selection or pen tools, etc.. You could do a lot of things here.
After I'm done in my alpha channel, I choose Filter: Render: Lighting Effects... and I'm immediately intimidated by this dialog box:
You know, whenever I'm trying out something new that has about nine zillion options, I'll eventually play around with them all, but at first it's not a bad idea to click OK and see what the effects is. If you haven't already messed around with the controls, the default settings will give you a pretty good idea what the filter does.
Over on the left side you get a so-so preview of what will happen to the image after you click OK. You can click & drag on the four points along the ellipse to control the diameter and direction of the light. Click on the center point to move the whole light around. (You can see how I arranged mine to the left.) You can click the little light bulb icon below there to add another light source if you want. (You might use the Lighting Effects Filter on its own to create spotlight(s) effects on an image, but we're here for texture)
I'm not going to go into all the controls in the Lighting Effects dialog in any great depth. It's more profitable for you to move the sliders around yourself. The names are pretty descriptive and as soon as you start sliding around the controls you'll get it. The Style: control has a ton of options. You can change the number of, and direction of the lights by selecting one of the options. Once you get a combination of settings you like, you can save it here, too. With Light Type: you get three options and slider controls for how bright the light is, and how wide of a spread it has. In Properties you get four more controls that determine things like how the light reflects off of the "surface" of the image and how it blends with the existing light.
Finally we get to Texture Channel. That's what we came here for! Click on the pop-up menu and you can choose from any of the images inherent channels, such as R, G, or B (try them out) or you can pick your alpha channel (if you've made one). You also get a great slider that controls how much of a bumpy effect you want the texture to have on the image.
In my final image there, after all that deliberation, I get a pretty neat, clear embossed text effect. |
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3.
One thing I hope I impress upon you in my tutorials, is just how many possible outcomes there are to a situation, and to explore them all. Once I try out one thing, I usually try out seven more variations. You can see one here. I duplicated the alpha channel containing my text and scaled it up. Then I applied the Lighting Effects Filter again. You can see how I changed the light's shape here:
The result is the same text effect but this time filling most of the image. Damn, it makes me want to own the Chevy Corvette! |
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4.
So far I've applied
this effect to photographic images. Another option is to apply a texture to a flat,
two-dimensional design. I just made an file with the same dimensions as the 'vette and filled it
with a blue hue. You could create some shapes, add some noise, apply a filter like clouds ( as I
did above) or whatever. I know my choice was less than creative, but hey, I want to keep this
simple. In my channels palette, I pasted the vette image (I could have also chosen Filter: Render: Texture Fill... and picked the Corvette image. If the image was smaller than my blue file, it would have been tiled for me.) Here you can see how I angled the light from the upper left:
and to the left you can see how the textured blue image looked afterwards. |
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5.
In this alternate,
I chose Directional from the Light Type: pop-up menu. When you do this the ellipse disappears, and your light source has the effect of being much farther away. This one change in the controls has a drastic effect on the outcome, as you can see.
Lets take a moment and appreciate the magnificence of Photoshop, shall we? From Corvette to blue rectangle to this, it only took a few clicks. While the result isn't going to make it into the history books, we got a very cool image. We too a daytime photo and simulated "kind of" a night-time effect. It doesn't look entirely photo realistic, but it definitely has a "mood" all its own. |
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6.
Time to use some
real Textures! (Photoshop gives you a few in a folder aptly named Textures in your Goodies Folder inside your Adobe Photoshop folder on your hard drive.) I made this grayscale one to the left in a program called Adobe TextureMaker. (I love Adobe!) If I Fill a new alpha channel with it and apply it (via the Lighting Effects filter) to the plain blue rectangle you saw earlier, I get the effect you see to the left. |
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7.
Another variation:
I made a magnified version of the same texture and applied it to our tired blue rectangle. This is
so simple once you get the hang of it that you could make tons of variations in a very short time.
If you know how to define and fill Patterns, or have any need to make backgrounds for web pages, you could get a lot of mileage out of this technique. |
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8.
Well, it's time to
go. I think you're ready now to go out into the world and start raising little textures and light
effects of your own.
As a means of saying farewell, I've applied our two most recent textures to an image of the French Alps. They are a couple of very different possible outcomes of using a texture on an image.
Which do you like better?
Have fun editing images! |
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