Here at DPS, we’ve already covered how to use textures in your photos to give them a completely different look and feel, but now it’s time to get inspired and create your own textures – all around your house.

Finding Textures

I typically shoot landscape photography.  And when I’m shooting a landscape, I’m looking at the big picture – where the horizon is, where the sun is at, the reflection on the water – everything.  However, textures aren’t about the big picture, though, they’re about the detail.  And we’re not always used to looking at the details.  A wall for us is usually the background – or something that’s just in the wall. But walls can make for some great textures, like this:

When I first started using Gimp to edit my photos (because I couldn’t afford Photoshop), I remember getting jealous when Photoshop users would talk about the Actions they used to edit their photos.

While Gimp doesn’t have Actions, they do have scripts, and while there might not be as many Gimp Scripts as there are Photoshop Actions available, there are certainly enough to keep you busy for a while.

Finding Scripts

You can find the Gimp Plugin registry here.  This site contains scripts and plugins.  Plugins increase the fuctionality of Gimp somehow (like the ability to support RAW files), and scripts are like Photoshop actions – ways to manipulate the photos you are editing.  On the right hand side is a Keyword search.  Here you can search for the type of thing you’re looking for.  Want to add a watermark to all your photos?  Search for Watermark.  Want to make a vintage-looking photo? Search for vintage.

If you’re not really sure what you’re looking for but just want to be inspired, instead of doing a keyword search, try scrolling down on the front page until you see the Browse the Registry options.  Sometimes I’ll take a look at the tag cloud, which shows you popular tags that people use to describe their plugins/scripts.  Note: Scripts (as opposed to plugins)

If you are like me you had a kaleidoscope as a kid. You would look through one end and turn a dial and the world would be displayed as a mirrored fractured shape. Thanks to Photoshop you can create kaleidoscopes from your photos. Any image with interesting color and shapes will work just fine.

Step 1

Convert the background layer to a regular layer by double clicking it and click Ok.

One of the nice things about Lightroom is that it lets you view before and after versions of your image. Lightroom can do this so easily because it does not make permanent changes to your image as you work on it. Instead, Lightroom keeps a log of the edits that you have made and only applies them to the image when you export the image.

Use the Before/After options in Lightroom to check that the changes you have made to your image to make sure that you’re headed in the right direction.

Here are some ways to harness the comparative Before/After power of Lightroom:

Step 1

If you are in the Develop module you’ll need to make sure that View Modes are enabled so that you can see the necessary icons. To do this, click the small triangle under the image to the right in the Develop module and choose View Modes.

Step 2

You will now see a button which has Y|Y on it. Click this to see the before and after views of your image.

Our last Monthly Critique featured an image from Lynne Daley with a dream-like quality.  This process is sometimes called the Orton Effect and Helen Brady laid out a great tutorial for producing such images using only one image in her article The Orton Effect: Mimicking darkroom processes in Photoshop.  For those looking to create the same effect using two images, as was Orton’s original slide process, I’ll lay out the basic steps first and then give some creative options as there are a lot of different looks to be achieved with this tutorial.

Step One – In The Field

Step one of this process is to take the photos!  You’ll need two individual photos of the same subject.  I’d highly recommend shooting with a tripod to make life easier in the computer later.

Shoot the first image with a small aperture and in focus.  I chose f/36.  Overexpose this image by two stops.  These settings gave me a shutter speed of 5 seconds which introduced some blur into the far tree, which, for me, works in this situation.  ISO 50.