Mark S. Johnson Photography

Textures applied to a photograph create the illusion that a two-dimensional scene has tactile, three-dimensional properties. Textures also have the ability to make an image appear as if it was crafted by hand rather than as pixels.

In today’s Workbench, we’ll employ a pair of textures from the Flypaper Textures collection. These are some of the finest textures available anywhere. If you decide to make a purchase after viewing them, enter the code MARKSJ during checkout to receive 15% off your order. We’ll use one of the textures as an image overlay and we’ll apply the other directly to a layer mask in order to add a unique, creative border. If you don’t own the Flypaper textures, consider using textures that you capture with your own camera, or visit a free textures site such as CGTextures.