photos

A lot of times, it is hard to find the type of texture you want to use for your project already as you want it. Many times I end up making very nice textures by taking a lot of raw stock texture photos, combining them into the same image as different layers, and then playing with transparencies, masking, and color. Some nice results can be achieved quickly this way, so let's do it! Note that for this particular guide, I am using Gimp but the concepts are all the same in Photoshop. First, I'm going to to think about what I want to make and find some stock textures to use.

Have a lot of images that you want to resize, rotate, compress, change the format of, or maybe add a watermark to all at once? FastStone Image Viewer, Editor, and Batch Converter, available here, is a great little piece of free software that is great for use in managing and adjusting your collection of photographs and images, but really shines as a batch image converter. When opened, the software displays its main screen; a typical image organizer, but one of its most powerful tools is the Batch Convert / Rename Dialog.