Helpful Resources

Shadow House Creations: Free Textures

Coffeeshop: Actions/presets/tutorials/brushes/frames

Brusheezy: Brushes/patterns

Photoshop Essentials: Tutorials

Best Photoshop Tutorials: Tutorials that are fun for photos. As well as creating digital artwork.

Dafont: Free fonts (make sure to read the authors terms/conditions.)

Photojojo: The newsletter has fun photo projects/crafts, and the store is pretty much awesome.

The Pioneer Woman: actions, and bits and pieces of everything else.

Editing Photos. Applying Textures in Photoshop.

*Click photos to make larger*

First off you are going to want to have some textures downloaded. I get most of my textures (which are free) from Shadow House Creations. Find a few that you like and save them somewhere you can easily find them.

Now select a photo you want to apply the texture(s) to. Open it in photoshop. Open the texture(s) you want to apply. I will be using this image.

In Photoshop go to texture image. In this case I'll be using Archaic Frame.

Copy the texture (shortcut command C) and then go to your image and paste it (command V).

Chances are the texture is smaller than the photo, so we need to transom it.

Go to edit > Free Transform (command T).

Grab one corner of the texture, hold down SHIFT and start to drag it towards the corner of your photo.

The texture may not fit the photo exactly. If needed let go of shift and just align the texture with all four corners of the photo. Or if you don't want to distort the texture you can keep holding down SHIFT and pull the texture out until it lines up with the photo. By choosing the second option you will lose part of the texture. Another option is to crop your photo.

Now you should NOT be able to see your photo at all because it is behind the texture. Now we need to edit the blending option to make the photo visible. Go to the Layer Tab > Layer Style > Blending Options.

You can also just go to the Layers window on the right side of the screen to change blending options.

Now you just need to choose the blending option you like best. Play around with the Fill and Opacity if the effect is too light/dark.

How I edit

I took part in the i ❤ faces fix it friday challenge. I thought I would share the technique I used to edit the photo with you guys! PLEASE follow my photography blog! It is so lonely over there! Thanks :] and enjoy! Happy editing. I'll once again apologize this is not the best tutorial, if you would like tutorials of how I do my work then leave a comment and I'll do my best to start writing some!
Candice Michal Photography

This is the original photo we had to edit. The photo is not mine, I just edited it.

And this is my finished product.
An overview of what I did:

Sorry I didn't keep track of the specifics for every single step but I'll do my best to remember.

1) Took the picture into iphoto and changed the levels, under exposed [not by much] and increased the contrast.

2) Still in iphoto I applied the antique filter, and then upped fade color 1 or 2 slots

3) Now to photoshop, I applied a photo filter, orange and played with the density until I was happy

4) I download all my brushes here, I found some swirly ones I like and dl them to my computer

5) I got two or three different swirl brushes for each corner and rotated them around, and played with size until I was satisfied. Each swirl is completely white with opacity 100% brush mode normal

6) I applied inner and outer glow, opacity 100% each, everything else I left at the default.

7) Then I submitted to iheartfaces :]

*note* The brushes are all free, some artists clarify that they do not want their brushes used if you are making money unless you are paying them or crediting them.