Before & After: Texture Experiments

Have you noticed that lately I’ve become a little bit obsessed with textures? I’m trying not to go overboard with applying textures to everything, but it’s hard when I’m so, so interested in experimenting! I think I need to set aside certain days or certain types of shots where I’m allowed to go crazy with experimentation. Before & After Thursday is a great way to allow myself those days!

For the past few days I’ve been trying to get shots of things that could make good textures. My first few experiments failed miserably, but I got some shots the other day which don’t look too terrible. I have no clue if they would work well as a texture layer, but I do plan on trying it out sometime!

Another thing that has me interested is presets for Adobe Camera Raw. I’ve seen people talk up Lightroom presets far and wide, but I had no idea they existed for ACR too! Recently, I read an article on MCP Actions’ site, Shooting Raw is the Only Way. That got me to thinking that editing in Raw as much as possible for the desired look is also a good idea. When I first started shooting Raw I did do most of my editing there and not really much in Photoshop at all. But now, I’m like a Photoshop junkie and I think I need to break the habit a bit. Presets will be a neat thing to experiment with! I know there are some free resources for ACR presets, like CoffeeShop, but I’m going to try saving my own to see if they’ll work for other photos.

For this week’s Before & After I decided to post my texture experiments edited only in Adobe Camera Raw. If you’re interested in trying these out as texture layers, you can click on the photo and download them from the Flickr site. I’m certainly not promising it will work very well, but if you try it and it looks cool, I would love to know about it!

These are shots of our patio outside. I like the way concrete looks!

Shot #1

Shot #2

It will be interesting to see what these look like as texture layers! I like shot #1 better. I also think I’ll experiment with blending these a bit to create different textures from them. I have to start learning somewhere!

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