andipantz

I’ve recently had a lot of people asking me about my use of papers, textures, and other media for creating composite photos.  For the last 2 years or so, I’ve been collecting and scanning old papers, letters, books, postcards, etc.  In my opinion, the grungier and dirtier they are, the better!  Sometimes you’ll even find me picking up trash off of the street and stashing it into a bag or my back pocket.  Hey–they’ve always said that one person’s trash is another person’s treasure!  Trust me….I’ve gotten some crazy looks from strangers and friends.
I use a flat bed scanner to create a high resolution scan of the item that I plan to use as a texture.  For some composite photos, I’ve used multiple textures.  For this example, I am using one.  The texture that I scanned was a blank page in the back of an old book.

Next, I choose the photo that I plan on using for the composite image.  In this case, it’s a photo that I took at Bowman’s Hill Wildflower Preserve.

I’m not going to go into details about how to create a composite photo in Photoshop.  But it’s generally quite easy if you know how to use layers.  You’ll also want to put that blending tool drop down menu to work in the Layers palette to see which blending mode suits your taste.  In this case, I used “overlay” and then made small adjustments to the curves of the flower photo and slightly reduced the opacity on the texture layer.  And voila!

To view or purchase any of the textures that I use, please check out my large collection of textures on istockphoto.

You can also view or purchase my previously created composite photos here.