Adding Texture to a White Area

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Adding Texture to a White Area

Often it can be difficult to add texture to a white area because the texture won't show on a pure white. As far as I know there isn't a good way to add texture to a pure white. You can either pick a more yellow or gray shade of white, or you can adjust your texture file to a white shade. The second method is what I'll be covering in this tutorial.

To being open up the texture file you're using in Photoshop. For this tutorial I'll be using this one.

Under the Image drop down menu select Adjustments -> Hue/Saturation

For this tutorial we are only concerned with the Lightness bar. You'll want to pull the little arrow as far to the right as you can while maintaining the details of your texture.

Now we have a white version of the texture. I'll save this as a new file in my project folder and whenever I'm making something I want to be white and textured, I'll clip this file to it, like so:

Yay! We did it!

FYI typo in the beginning smiley "To being" rather than to begin.

Also, if the blend mode is normal and the opacity is set to 100, how is the outline of the flower still showing? I always set my textures to overlay or one of a few other blend modes to get my desired look. Is it just a special circumstance when the texture is white? or is the white of the pattern it's own layer and the outline a seperate layer?

Thanks for the Info. I might experiment with this tip.

Thanks for this tip. It works in Elements (14), too. Darken seems to be the best blending mode, although any of the Darken group will do it. Since the texture you chose isn't actually grayscale, I converted it to black and white, since otherwise, it seemed to give the white in the final document a slight color cast of the original color of the texture doc. Thanks for a fun exercise!

Hello, me again! I did some more playing around, and I found that with the Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer, I was able to get the background of the texture file whiter, while preserving the texture.You use the Brightness slider til the texture shows as much as you like and then use the contrast slider, which makes the light part lighter while preserving the dark part. Again, this is in Elements 14, on a Mac.

Thank you for the tip. I'll certainly use it in my works.