This photo was taken on our fall trip to Waterton National Park in Southern Alberta. I have yet to visit this area without seeing a rainbow. It’s kind of like Hawaii in that regards – almost impossible not to see one at some point during your trip.

This weekend I participated in a marathon of painterly styled photos on Google+, between that and some special people who have started to use my textures, interest in them has increased. (Hi Amy and Cindy – I really appreciate you mentioning me!) Interest in how to actually use them has also been expressed. I’ve always intended to do more tutorials here, but I always end up getting busy and sidetracked. I thought I’d better get with it, so I’m going to walk you through how I used the textures in this image.

I shoot in raw so processed this image in Camera Raw prior to opening it in Photoshop. I won’t walk you through all the steps I followed to optimize the image prior to opening it because it’s a highly individual process based on intuition, mood, and the aesthetics I want at the time. I could process the same photo a dozen times and come up with a different look each time. What I want to do in the raw processing is set the color and light tones, and optimize sharpness (or not). There are many controls which allow you to fine tune the image.

Once the image was processed to what I wanted I opened it up in Photoshop. The first texture I applied was Dabo:

I set the blend mode to Soft Light and reduced the opacity to 70%.

Next I used the Monet texture:

I changed the blend mode to Soft Light again but reduced the opacity to 60% this time. The effects are subtle. The landscape and original photo are fine so I don’t want to overwhelm them with textures. What I’m looking to do is create a dreamy aura to the image. Let the intent and mood of the image dictate your choices in texture and blend modes. Experiment with all the different blend modes available to see the effect it will have on your image. Don’t forget you can play with the opacity to reduce the effect.

I could have quit there but wanted to bump up contrast a bit. Instead of using Curves, Levels, or other adjustment levels, I decided to do a “painted” dodge and burn layer. For this I created a blank layer and filled it with 50% gray. I then used a soft brush at 10% opacity and brushed in where I wanted to darken or lighten parts of the image using black or white paint colors. I applied a gaussian blur at about 40% to this layer and changed the blend mode to Overlay.

The final image.