#ps:texture

Information: 

Difficulty Level: Intermediate What You’ll Need: Photoshop ( I will be using PS CC 2017 ) What This Goes Over: In this tutorial I will be walking you through step by step in a tutorial on how to use the textures in this pack. 

Let’s Begin . . . 

Preperation: The first thing you need to do is find what image you’re going to be using as a base as well as the texture you want. I’m going to be using this image by Laura Makabresku to attempt to recreate an old promo graphic of mine. This is where you want to implement any of the PSDs you plan on using and if you’re creating a graphic, try to create that first before getting into the animated textures. You don’t have to, but it’s a lot easier to handle if you do. For mine, I’m going to use an old and basic PSD of mine which you can download here. I applied my action as well so now my image is sharpened and looks like this:

It’s a little boring, right? So I’m going to add a few textures to make it look better as well as some text, a fill layer, and maybe even distort the actual image. This is my result: 

With a graphic like the one we’re making, you don’t have to go too crazy with the textures. You can if you want, but take it from someone who's worked with Photoshop for 5 years — you don’t want to overwhelm your viewers. Textures are great, but when you’re adding an animated one on top of normal ones, it can get chaotic really fast. So now we’re going to move onto the next part. 

Applying Your Texture

So up until this point, you’ve most likely been working under the “Essentials” side of Photoshop. In the upper right hand corner, you’ll find a button that looks like this: 

Click that and then click the “Motion” option. This should bring up your timeline. Your frames may not appear but once you click the button that says “Create Frame Animation”, they will. Open up the animated texture you’re going to use. I’m going to be using one of the fire textures. Once your gif is open, you’ll see all the frames in the timeline. Count how many there are and create the same amount of frames in your edit by pressing this button. 

Next, you want to make sure that your frame delay is the same for both your edit, and the animation. To do this quickly, highlight all of your frames in your animated gif and press the little button that looks like this: 

Press “Other” and enter in your frame delay. You may need to change the timing until you like it. For mine, I liked the way 0.05 looked and that’s typically what I usually do anyways. Whatever number you’ve entered, go into your edit and make all of the frames that same exact number for the frame delay. Change your format into the timeline for both of your images by pressing this button:

Now, go to your animation and highlight all of the layers that are there and right click on them. A little window thing should pop up and press “Convert to Smart Object”

All of your frames should now be compressed into one single layer. Drag the frame animation window into it’s own so your screen looks something like this:

Take your smart object from your animated texture and drag it over to your edit. Your texture should now be in the same document as your edit. Use CTRL + T to transform the size of the smart object until you think it looks good. The best way to transform your layer while still maintaining the dimensions of it and not distorting it would be to hold the SHIFT key down while you resize it from the corners of the layer. If you do it on the sides or the top or bottom, it doesn’t work. It has to be the corner. This is what my document now looks like. 

Now, this part varies from person to person as well from image to image. With your smart object still selected, you can begin to play with the blending modes which look something like this:

For my image, I put the blending mode at Screen with 100% Opacity and Fill. Like I said before, this varies from personal preference and intent on the Photoshoppers behalf of how they want the image to look as well as the images themselves and their coloring. Also, remember to save it as a .GIF and keep in mind that Tumblr has a file size limit which is 10MB. If your file exceeds this, the gif will not work. In that case, just delete a few layers or make the image itself smaller until you get to 10MB or below. If you’re using this tutorial to make .GIFs for your theme, you can get around the size limit by following this tutorial. This is my final product: