Russell Brown’s Paper Texture Panel – A Real Winner!

If you love Photoshop and you don’t follow what Russell Brown is doing, you need to start right now. I do believe a lot of people are Photoshop gurus but Russell Brown is at the top of the stack – partially because he works for Adobe and helps develop all these cool things we love. Well he is back again with one of his great scripts – this time one that creates a panel to add a texture, resize it to fit your image, and set a blend mode for you all within a single click! This is brilliant! Flypaper Textures has graciously supplied us Photoshop folks with 12 absolutely beautiful textures to try out on your photos in the panel, which is what you are seeing in all the images in this post. (For the above image, Paper Texture Touchstone using Overlay blend mode at 73% opacity, Paper Texture Creme Anglaise using Hard Light blend mode at 88% opacity and a layer mask to lightly paint out some of the effect on the flower details, and a Color Fill Adjustment layer using color dcdf91 set to Multiply blend mode at 11% opacity were used to create this look.) See my blog links at bottom for other Russell Brown creations.

Above is an example of a landscape type image that also does well with textures. (All blend modes were set to Overlay and stacked with Paper Texture Creme Anglaise at 63% opacity, then Paper Texture Dawn Grunge set to 56% opacity, and Paper Texture Muscatel set to 45% opacity. Next Topaz Simplify – see my Tidbits Blog sidebar for website – plug-in was used to get a more painterly effect.)

Russell Brown’s Paper Texture Panel is now called Adobe Texture Pro Panel and allows other texture folders to be used, but still contains the beautiful Flypaper textures. Below is what the interface looks like after you add the panel. In case you cannot see it, the top field is for the blend mode you wish to select.

If you click the Randomizer button at the bottom, it will select two textures and stack them to give some combinations you might not have thought to put together. This panel only works with Photoshop CS5 and CS6 (the screen shot above is from the new beta Photoshop CS6 interface). These textures work well with flowers.

(This image used Paper Texture Creme Anglaise using Color Dodge blend mode at 36% and Paper Texture Apple Blush using Overlay blend mode at 100% opacity with a layer mask and lightly painting out the effect on the leaves.) I changed this same image and used a Hue Saturation Adjustment Layer and Photo Filter Adjustment Layer to get brown and pink tones. Very similar look but different colors – try it!

If you like textures on your images, this is going to be a major time-saver and will let you try some new combinations of textures very quickly. I am already loving this panel. And now Russell has created an update to add in your own textures (see my blog link above). There is plenty here to keep you busy!…..Digital Lady Syd

Digital Lady Syd Related Blogs:
Think Pink! Rally for the Cure Pink Rose – Uses Russell Brown’s Painting Assistant Panel
Edit Layers with ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) Script – Russell Brown’s great script that lets you place a layer back into ACR once Photoshop is opened
Adobe Photoshop CS5′s Mixer Brushes – contains link to Russell Brown tutorial called “Clone Painting Basics”
Tips for Flower Textures
Soft-Look Flowers Using Textures
Why I Love OnOne’s Perfect Layers!