Using Your Own Pictures as Textures

Katie Lloyd Photography posted a great tutorial here about combining two pictures you've taken together. She combined a picture of clouds with a great picture of hot air balloons.  I loved the result and started scanning through old pictures to see if I had anything I could try something similar with.  I came across this picture of clouds that I took while driving from LA to Las Vegas.



Then I went even further back in my archives and found this picture that I took in Taiwan that I always liked. It was taken in the Taroko Gorge, about 2 hours outside of Taipei (which is an absolutely AMAZING place.) While there I hiked up to this temple that is said to be the highest altitude temple in the world. And in front of it was this amazing statue. This is the picture I took SOOC.



I ran Pioneer Woman's Boost action and adjusted the layers a bit and cropped the photo to get this.



I liked the picture, but it always bothered me how white and blown out the sky was. So I thought it might be a good picture to try this cloud technique with. I dragged the cloud picture above on top of my picture and used the "multiply" blending mode. Then I used my paint brush set to white on a low opacity to erase the texture and lighten the picture around the statue and a bit on the mountains.

The result gave me a much more dramatic sky for my picture!



I should note that both the cloud and statue pictures were taken with old point and shoot cameras, as my DSLR was just an apple in my eye at the time!

Travelling is one of my favorite things, but until my last Paris trip, I've always only had point-and-shoots with me! Still, I think I may have to do a post soon with some of my favorite travel pictures from the archives!