I’ve been experimenting with textures along with a (new to me) technique in Photoshop called Dodge and Burn. Combine some cool textures with these two techniques and you can do some pretty cool stuff. Here are a couple of examples.

The first is a shot I originally made of Emma Pew of Black Carl at the McDowell Mountain Music Festival back in May, 2010. The background was all sky and it was pretty washed out.

I took Emma, used the polygonal lasso tool to crop her out, and placed her on a cool background. I then added a few filters, went over certain parts with the Burn tool, other part with the Dodge tool.

The second is mainly the burn tool. The original picture had Quinnton and Roxann posing, and they looked great, but the bottom of the picture looked awkward because it was showing the underneath of the big truck. Lots of ugly white space. I burned all that out so that the attention would be given to the couple and not the empty space below them.

Happy Wednesday!