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Testimonial

"You know, the last time a Photoshop tool made me do a double take and stare in amazement is when I first tried EasyS a few years back. I just tried out EasyDS and I was wowed yet again. Such a simple interface, yet the results are fantastic! I'm not talking about a subtle difference here, I did an A/B comparison and what I thought was sharp turned out to be pretty blurry :) And EasyDS does this without the usual ugly artifacts. Great job! P.S. Before trying to use exotic sharpening plugins or raw converters, photographers really need to look into your sharpening plugins. Their images will look better and they'll save a bundle." - Robert G. June 2009

Over the last 2 years we have written a lot about Texture Blending (see our resources page). It is time to show a more recent example.

We shot this photo close to home:

This oak hill is part of a ranch in a very lovely setting. Likely a nice shot by itself but we thought that adding some texture could help to improve the mood of this photo. We applied a texture to the photo using our DOPF017 Texture Blending script

Here is our final stack:

We did want to use only the pattern and not the green color of this texture. This can be easily done by toning down the texture saturation:

HueSat_master_02 layer

By default the blended image would look like this:

Here we find that the texture too strong on the hill itself (the sky is fine). That is why we created a simple mask to reduce the blending on the hill.

Applying this harsh mask on the blending layer group is not looking too good.

We fix the transition by using the Mask panel:

The feather setting of 63 pixels smoothens the transition. We also want to apply some blending to the hill. This was achieved by turning down the mask opacity to 43%.

Some final Curves layer to brighten the image and we are done:

Final Image

With Texture blending we added a mood that the original image was missing.

Note: Border was added with our Simple Frame script.