Thousands of people have downloaded the FREE Texture Applicator Photoshop Actions Set since its release just over a month ago. But now there’s another reason to celebrate! Finally, a video tutorial teaching you how to use this photoshop action to add textures to your photos. Sometimes texture is just too much for skin, so I will also teach you how to mask off texture from selective parts of the image.

To use this action you will want to find some great textures. You can also download the one used in this video made by Jessica Drossin Photography.

Thank you to Heather Armstrong and Lisa Gilbert Photography for allowing me to use their beautiful photos in this video.

When editing in Photoshop, what is the best format to save photos in? Which makes the most sense for photographers?

To learn which file formats are best and which I use, check out my guest post on the Digital Photography School.

Digital Photography School is the publisher of the Photo Nuts and Bolts book. If you are a beginner photographer, check out this excellent e-book.

When I visited Atlanta, my hometown, around New Years, I had a blast taking photos of my nieces and nephew. I also had the opportunity to take a some photos of my sister, who is 26. She is 12 years younger than me… so you do the math. We were having so much fun, and I kept hearing about her best friend Jen, who is trying to meet the “man of her dreams.”

I offered to photograph her for fun.  She came over and we had very little good light left as the sun was starting to go down.  I had to work fast. My goal was to come out with a few photos she could use on dating services. I have a 100% success rate with pictures for dating photos. I should add that the “one” and “only” person I did this for prior married the person she met on JDate.com with the photo I shot and edited.

Anyway, here’s Jen.  The 1st shot is straight out of camera, the second is edited in color, the third converted to black and white.

Details on the edit and which MCP Photoshop actions were used:

1. I started by running Crackle from the Quickie Collection.
2. Next I ran the Color Burst action from the Complete Workflow Set. I kept all layers at the default opacity.
3. I noticed that her skin was too pinkish (a result of too much blue/not enough yellow. So I used the Magic See-Saw action from the Bag of Tricks action set. I used yellow up/blue down. The teeth got too yellow, so I masked them back.
4. I wanted to enhance the eyes, so I ran the Eye Doctor action.  I used the Catchlight layer and Sharp as a Tack.
5. Lastly I wanted to lightly smooth her skin.  Her skin was already really nice so I used Magic Powder from the Magic Skin action set at 40% opacity.
6. The steps above achieved the color edit. For most black and white images, I fully edit in color.  Then I use Vanilla Ice Cream from the Quickie Collection on top. That is exactly what I did here as well.  I love the simplicity of the black and white here.

Here are a few other photos we took in the shoot.