Editing Photos and Adding Textures

Very rarely do I scrapbook a photo I haven't edited - at least a little bit. Almost every photo can use a little touching up in my opinion. Sometimes I do get lazy and just print them out, but I am always more pleased with the ones I edit first. I'm going to walk you through some of my processes that I use to edit my photos. I do all my editing in Photoshop Elements 4.0 - not the lastest edition, but it works for me (and besides who wants to pay $100 for a new version with just a few changes?).

Here is a photo I took of my nephew, Dustin last month. It's cute the way it is now, but I'm going to show you how doing a few extra things can really make the colors pop.
The next step is the most common thing I do with my photos. In the layers palette, I duplicate the background layer. I then choose "overlay" from the drop down menu. I play around with the opacity of the layer until I get the right balance of color. Here are the results (with this photo, I set the opacity to 61% because I wanted the brighter colors):
Most of the time I stop there, but sometimes, depending on the photo and the mood I want to create, I add a dark border around the edges of the photo. Once again, I duplicate the background layer so I can easily erase the layer if I don't like the look. I use the burn tool (the one that looks like a hand), choose a medium soft round brush and go around the edges of my photo until I get the desired level of black I want.
Sometimes I like to change my photos to black and white or a sephia. The easiest way to change to black and white is to choose Enhance > Adjust Color > Remove Color.
To change to sephia, choose Adjust Color > Adjust Hue/Saturation. Click the "colorize" box, then move the Hue slider to somewhere around 25 and the Saturation slider to somewhere around 17 to get the hue of sephia below:
Another fun thing to do is add textures. The following three textures were made by Andrew McConnochie and can be downloaded HERE. There are a ton of cool textures that are all free! When you see one you want to download, click on it, choose "all sizes" then choose the original size and download. This is the one I used on the photo below (pleasantly called "Mold Complex 4"):
Textures are really easy - you simply drag the texture onto your photo and resize it if you need to in order to cover the entire photo. At this point, you won't be able to see the photo underneath, so click "soft layer" from the drop down menu in the layers palette. You can also experiment with the other layers (overlay, hard light, etc) to get the look you want.
You can see from the photo above that some of the texture has covered up Dustin's face and skin, making him look like he has gone moldy. Simply choose a soft brush eraser and erase the parts of the texture covering the skin of the face and hands.
You can also play around with the opacity of the texture - the photo above is with 100% opacity, the one below is 75%. I really like this texture - it warms up the photo.
Here's the original photo below so you can compare it to our final product above:
Here's some other examples with different textures downloaded from the same site listed above. This is the Texture Scar 2:


And the Wood Texture Colour Burn and Darkened:


That's it! I would love to see your results if you play around with these techniques - make sure to send me a link!