Anatomy of An Image, Week 2

I thought this week I'd try something new. First, here's the image.

Specs:
ISO 100
Focal Length: 55mm
Shutter Speed: 1/640 of a second
Aperture: f/2.8
Lens: my 17-55 f/2.8 IS which hardly ever leaves my camera, honestly
Time of day: late afternoon, facing west

So this is some bouganvillea I encountered on a walk home, with some nice backlight happening. A nice image, sure, but not groundbreaking. Any flower with light coming through the petals is going to have some visual interest. Below is another image I took on the same afternoon, with the same light, except that I took this one facing south. (Side light for texture, remember? I went a little crazy with that theory on this particular afternoon.)

My plan for this image of paint peeling off a garage door was never for it to stand alone as an image, although there is certainly some visual interest there. No, I took this for the sole purpose of using it - gasp - in PHOTOSHOP. You know it, that tool of the devil and overzealous magazine editors who use it to prune models down to toothpick size, removing and adding body parts at their will. 

Well, I had a similarly nefarious purpose. I planned to take the texture layer, and then overlay it on the picture of the flower, to add a little more visual interest. Now there are plenty of tutorials out on the web on how to do this - if you can use PS it's pretty easy. Here's a quick and dirty:

Step 1: Open both files. I was lucky, I shot both with the same camera and both were uncropped so I didn't need to do any resizing. This made step 2 super easy.

Step 2: Copy the texture and add it as a separate layer on top of the flower. You shouldn't be able to see the flower any more - oh no!

Step 3: It's ok, we can bring the flower back. If your texture is colored in any distracting way you should switch the blend mode of your texture layer to Luminosity. In my case, I kind of liked the subtle yellow, so I left the blend mode at Normal. Then bring the opacity of the texture layer waaaaaay down. I mean, almost so it's not there any more. I'm not kidding, mine was finally at 3%. But then I'm a fan of subtle. And it depends on which texture you use as well, I'm sure.

And you end up with:

Subtle, right? But a bit different. (Feel free to sound off in the comments and be like "Jessica, I do not see a gosh-danged difference at all!) Back when everyone and their grandmother was overlaying textures onto their images I was a little skeptical. But now that the fad has died down a bit I feel like I can experiment without being part of a fad. And that's so important to my self image, you know?