A: Textures are images that blend with your background image that give it more complexity and often makes your image look better.

How to use textures

Textures are quite easy to use. First, take an image that will become your background image. Now you can get a texture from many sites on the internet. It's really simple: you just type textures into any search engine.

Once you find a suitable texture that will fit on your image, you copy the image and paste it. When you paste it, the texture looks like it covers the whole image. However, this is not what you want it to look like. For starters, you can change the opacity of the texture layer. This however, is well short of what Photoshop can do.

For more ambitious people, there's also another option where you can change the blending options of the image. First of all, click the small “f” at the bottom of the layers window.

Next, you will see a window with many different blending modes. Experiment with the different types and opacity. Below you can see I have used the “screen” blend mode with 75% opacity to create this effect.

I have created a nice effect using the texture.

Happy texture using and await my next tutorial - patterns!

A: Brushes are stamps that you put on an image to give it more complexity and style.

Finding brushes is simple; you type “brushes” on any search engine and there should be many brush sites. Once you find a brush “set” that you like you must download it onto your computer.

If the brush set is Photoshop compatible and it is a .abr file, then download it to the following directory. If not, then skip the following:

For .abr files C:Program FilesAdobePhotoshop CSPresetsBrushes

Before you can use your new brush you have to do the following. Open up Photoshop, and click on the brushes window. If the window is not already open then go window - brushes on the top bar.

Click on the arrow in the top right corner and click load brushes. Open the brushes file that you downloaded earlier and the brushes should appear at the end of the list of loaded brushes.

For other files

For most other brush sets, there should be a “stamps” option available. Copy the stamps image into Photoshop. Next, use a selection tool to select one of the brushes. With the selection, go to edit - define brush preset on the top bar.

You can also do the same for custom brushes. Just draw your brush and follow the steps above for other files.

To use the brush, use either the pencil or brush tool and click on the brush you want to use, and insert it into the image. You can change the brush size at the bottom of the window.

Happy brush using!