Spruce Up Those Boring Photos

Open your image. Duplicate this layer (I always duplicate, never work off the background in case you need it later)

First thing I did was found a brick image. I pulled this over to my original a couple times (since it wasn’t long enough). I reduced the opacity to about 15%, you want the effect of brick but don’t want it taking over. I grouped my two bricklayers together.

Now I am going to add my painter:

I opened my image and drug it over:

I erased all the actual paint parts and added a drop shadow:

So far I have this:

Now, I am going to add more brick. I used a different brick picture for this just to give some variation. I reduced the opacity and erase most of the picture so I am left with just a little bit here and there. I did this in a couple spots. You can see the brick in the upper right corner and down around where the paint roller is:

Now, I brought over a little section of the original painter picture:

I took my paint buck and changed the color to almost the same as the original picture and I erased some of it:

Now, I decided to crop down my image. I also moved the top right grey brick down some so it wouldn’t be cut out.

I also used my burn tool to darken some of the top and bottom to give some variation.

Next, I added some rope. I actually took the rope out of another image of a guy painting. I made it longer and added a drop shadow. And doubled it:

Lets add some more texture. We are going to use the brush tool for this. Here is the brush I used:

Now on a new layer, randomly paint some areas that we are going to add texture to.

After that, I went to Filter > Artistic > Rough Pastels. These were my settings but keep in mind that yours might be different:

Next, go to Filter > Texture > Craquelure: (again, your settings might be different)

I repeated these steps a couple times until I got the desired look.

Lastly, I just added a stroke around the whole thing so it looks more finished. You could use this kind of picture on the side of a building or a billboard. Just be creative.

Topics: Design, Manipulation, Photoshop