How to add interest to your photos using borders and textures

Hello and welcome to my blog. If you’re interested in taking better photos of waves, surfers, people and seascapes, this is the place for you.

I’ve been experimenting with adding texture and frames to my photos to give them more depth and interest. Here’s a shot I took last year of Sarah Beardmore at Fistral. It was shot on a Canon eos 40d using my trusty 600mm f4L lens.

The border comes from collection I bought on disc many years ago, back when you had to buy such things. Do people buy stuff anymore? It’s all free on the internet I guess? A quick search found something similar here with a tutorial on how to make an alpha channel in Photoshop – this is how you get the image into the frame.

The next stage is to get the texture over the image. There are same great free textures available over on Flickr. The one I used is here. All you need to do to download it is to click on all sizes and download the size you want. The original size is probably best. Then you re-size it the same size as your image, copy and paste it into your surfing image. Here’s the texture I downloaded from Flickr.

Next you need to adjust the layer in the layers pallet in photoshop. “Soft Light” works quite well. “Multiply” is sometimes good, although it will darken the image. You can play around with the opacity and even invert the layer or change the hue and saturation until you get the look you want. It’s great fun and brings out your creative juices. Here’s another image, along with the original straight out of the camera.