Free Photoshop textures can be used to enhance your images. Textures add depth and dimension to a photograph. They can be used to evoke emotions or to increase the impact of a particular image. What's more, finding textures for free is not hard.
How to Find Free Photoshop Textures
The following websites offer free Photoshop textures. They vary in ease of use, size of the available textures, and the rights granted to the artist and the end user. Remember to check the artists' credits sections before taking any texture for use.
- Free Photoshop Textures: This website contains dozens of free textures, both color and grayscale. It is also easy to navigate and breaks the textures into categories such as grass textures, concrete textures, animal textures and metal textures. Within those categories, there are small selections of each type of texture which can be right-clicked and saved on your computer. The texture files are not particularly large and the selection is somewhat limited, but this is balanced by the speed and ease of navigation on this site.
- CG Textures: CG Textures is a site which contains hundreds of free Photoshop textures and samples. The website requires that you create an account in order to download a texture. It is organized by category and uses an expandable menu system on the left navigation bar in order to find the category of textures you are looking for. It is comprehensive and has an enormous selection of textures available for download. The downloaded files are large and are suitable for many Photoshop texture projects.
- Design Reviver: This site has a good collection of unusual and vintage textures culled from DeviantArt. They are not organized in any particular order, rather, they are grouped into "packs" which must be downloaded from DeviantArt directly. Each DeviantArt artist has specific instructions for using and crediting these tools, so make sure that you read the artist's directives carefully before downloading them. These textures are beautiful and really attest to the level of talent which can be found on DeviantArt.
- Graphic Mania: Graphic Mania is a blog packed with Photoshop tutorials for nearly every aspect of the program, including photography and illustration. The textures in this blog are breathtaking and can be downloaded by right clicking and saving to the desktop or by downloading packs of textures from the downloads section. The downloaded files are large and of high quality, which makes them excellent for larger projects.
- Free Photoshop: This site contains several unusual textures. However, they are somewhat difficult to find as this site contains a lot of advertising. The top toolbar on this site links to many useful free Photoshop textures and tools. The textures are large, high-quality downloadable files. The one drawback to this site is the excessive advertising.
Using Photoshop Textures
There are several techniques for using a Photoshop texture, including simply placing it as a layer in your Photoshop work. Photoshop also offers a texture overlay tool which allows you to save your texture and apply it using the bevel or emboss tools. This allows you to adjust the depth and scale of your texture, so it can be overt or subtle. Texturizing an image adds extra interest and can really set a photo apart from others.
