A fun texture tutorial!

I've been smitten by a new trend :) I have long loved bokeh, the sparkly orbs of light that get caught in the out of focus parts of the frame. I've been redecorating my nursery room in preparation for this little girl of mine, due in December and I found this wonderful etsy artist who took this shot;





 I love how there's bokeh in the sky! How'd she catch that I wondered and then it hit me, a bokeh texture!  AHA! Genius! So I purposefully took some shots at the State fair this year thinking this would work great on a carnival type photo and I love it! I'm going to slap bokeh on everything in true "Ashley" form, if something works slap it everywhere ;) So here's how I do it;

I take the original photo and open it in photoshop. Then I grab a bokeh texture. If you type bokeh into google you get thousands of bokeh images. Pick a freebie and grab it. Open it in photoshop and then just drag and drop it onto your original photo. This is the bokeh I used;


Once you've got the bokeh on top of your photo you'll have two layers;

Using the arrow tool in the top left corner grab a corner of the bokeh and drag it to fill the entire frame;

Now that your photo is hidden under the bokeh photo we'll turn it into a texture. Double click the bokeh layer in the layers pallette and a layer styles window will pop up. Under general blending options select the drop down menu blend mode and change it to overlay.

Now you have this!

I already love it but I like more subtle tones so I'm going to erase off some of the overlay bokeh from the ride thingy (whatever it was, it looked like a death trap!). Using my eraser tool I make sure the bokeh layer is selected in the layers palette and erase away.

Ahh, there now isn't that magical!! So sparkly... I like sparkly things :) Have fun trying out some bokeh textures!! Here are a few more shots I slapped this technique on!

A little more antique

if you're using it on a person be sure to watch out for odd discoloration on the skin. I erased all the texture off his skin.