PhotoShop Question: Combining textures

I did a search looking for an answer, but couldn't find anything.

I am trying to figure out how to combine two textures into one, using PhotoShop. I should probably explain what I mean by combining textures.

Let's say I have two textures; one of a plain brick wall, and one of a big mural or painting. I would like to combine the two textures in such a way as to make it appear as if the mural was painted directly onto the brick wall. I have tried laying the mural on top of the brick, and adjusting the transparency of the mural, but that doesn't look right.

Does anyone know how to do this? Am I even explaining myself clearly?

there are many on here who know a helluva lot more about PS than I do, but one approach is to change the layer type itself. Instead of using "Normal", try making it an overlay, or soft light, etc... I often experiment with both this and tranparency to get the right feel. You can also play around with which layer you use as an overlay... try the painting first on a "Normal" brick... then try overlaying brick on a "normal" painting (at least just a cutout of the brick texture over the painting part... you'll probably want a full brick layer in the background)

you could try multiplying the layer. it's one of the options in the pulldown box in the layer tab. i've used that to create something similar to what you're doing. hope that helps.

Like most things in Photoshop, it's relatively simple but you can make it as complicated as you want.

Simple answer: create a new layer over your brick texture and paste your mural on it. Then, change the mural layer's blending mode. Depending on your version of PS you should have a little pulldown menu at the top of your layers palette that normally says "Normal". Open that and you get a list of blending modes for the layer such as Darken, Multiply, Color Burn, etc. "Darken" will probably work fine but it's hard to be definitive without seeing your texture. Play around and one of those modes should be what you need. Once your mural is blended you can add touches like roughing the edges to simulate wear, slightly erasing the mural from the joints between the bricks, and other stuff as you prefer. Incidentally, the PS documentation has a great explanation of what each blending mode simulates. Check it out.

Edit: There are a lot of fast typists in SL.

I'm still working on figuring this out myself--but I know there's some way to do it within the layer's 'blending options'

I know I've used the 'multiply' feature to get an image on a towel texture before and it was pretty decent.

But anyway, click on the layer and access 'blending options from the layers menu (the right arrow in the layers window). there are a ton of them to try out and play with.

Hopefully, someone else will chime in with a more definitive answer...

i doubt there is a definitive answer. I just whipped this up (which you may or may not like, LOL, but i didn't have time to be fancy)

bottom layer: stone at Normal, 100%
middle layer: painting, normal, at like 95% fill
top layer: stone, on overlay and Fill set to around 55% (i changed the settings while playing more, and forgot the exact ones)

then i slightly blurred outside edge of painting

Multiply also had a decent effect -- although made the image darker

Edit:
to really make it nice, you'd want to edit the outside edge of the painting to account for the dips between the bricks/stones (where the mortar is)... the real thing obviously wouldn't have such a straight line (as Julian pointed out)

You deffinately want to change the blending method as suggested above (it really supprises me how many people don't know about this when it's often so useful). Which one will work best usually depends on what's on the layers and how you want them to look when composited. I find it best to just flick through them all until you find one that works well.

Sometimes it's good to use multiple copies of the layers with different blends, orders and transparencies to get the result you want. You might want to add a gaussian blur to one or more of these layers if it's looking too sharp.

Now go and play, I've found that's easily the best way to learn how to do things in Photoshop. Here's some other things you might want to look at for this job:

1. Image > Adjustments > Lots of useful stuff in this menu, especially levels, colour balance and hue/saturation
   
2. Filter > Render > Lighting effects (occasionally useful for sorting bad lighting but please don't overuse it )
   
3. Adjustment layer and layer mask buttons on the bottom of the layers pallet (lets you paint masks and sections you want to adjust)

Wow! You guys are fast!!! Thanks so much for the responses, I will play around with those settings. And just FYI, the brick and mural was only an example. I actually can see this being more useful for clothing design, and making painted textures have a "cloth-like" look to them.

Julian gave me an idea. Go to the brick layer and select the magic wand. Set it's tolerance so that it will select most of the mortar between the bricks. Now make a new layer on top of the painting layer and fill it with a color sampled from the mortar (off-white probably). Then adjust the opacity to tone down the paint on the mortar.

Here's my attempt...

I'm away from Photoshop at the moment so I can't give you exact details, but there's an "emboss" section under "blending options" for the layer. Then under emboss there's "pattern" or texture or something like that. So if you save your brick image as a pattern, then you can choose it from the patterns list in blending options. Then use the emboss effect to apply highlights and shadows that match the brick contours. Combine that with the transparency and blending suggestions above, and it should be pretty convincing.

This was from an old project where I was asked to make the image look as if it was cracking and peeling off a wall.

I used alpha masking from an intermediate texture of peeling paint to cut parts of the figures away. I then applied the remaining parts of the image to a cracked wall texture using Pin Light for a layer mode.

Thats superb! I have learnt so much from these forums..i swear!

Thanks this is a VERY good tip for the stuff I make for my store

SL residents will thank you...well no, they'll thank me..but I'll be thinking of you and thanking you silently!