Before and After: Creating Dreamy Light with Textures

I am fascinated with the way some people are so good at using textures to change their images.  I’m more of a ‘recreational user’ when it comes to textures, but I wanted to share this one I was playing around with because the textures really changed the feel of the image!  It’s fun to play!

 

Here is the Before:

 

 

And here is where we are going with it:

 

 

Let’s get started!  The first thing I did was to soften the undereye circles with the patch tool.  Here is the result:

 

 

Next, I ran my free Sparkling Eyes action and painted it onto the eyes with a 20% brush:

 

 

Then I warmed up the highlights with a color balance layer (to warm especially the skin):

 

 

Next, I did a small curves bump to brighten the midtones.

 

 

Now that I feel like my image is nice and ‘cleaned up’, I added my first texture.  This first texture was free from Shadowhouse Creations.  It is “Blur-11″ from the free October 2012 Blurred Texture Set.

 

 

I placed the texture over my image, set it to the ‘Screen’ blending mode, and lowered the opacity to 44%.  Then I added a mask to the blur layer.

 

 

I removed some of the lightness/texture from her eyes and mouth so they weren’t so ‘washed out’.  I just painted on the mask with a soft black brush at about 20% opacity.  Here is what my mask looks like up close, you can see where I painted lightly over the eyes and mouth:

 

And here is the image with the first texture applied (again, on Screen mode at 44%, eyes and mouth lightly masked out):

 

 

Next I really wanted to infuse some warmth into the image, so I used a Gradient Map Adjustment layer (after my Happy Accident, I love using Gradient Map adjustment layers on different blending modes to really change the colors/tones in an image!).  I chose a bright pink and a bright orange for the colors.

 

 

I put the pink/orange Gradient Map layer on the Soft Light blending mode, and turned the opacity down just a bit to 93%.  Here is where we are now:

 

 

Finally, for some extra dreamy light, I added a bokeh texture.  This particular texture was, again, free from Shadowhouse Creations.  It is called “Bokeh-1″ and is from the October 2012 Bokeh Texture Set.

 

 

I placed it on top of my image, set it to the ‘Hard Light’ blending mode, and reduced the opacity to 85%.  Then again I added a mask and painted over the subject with a soft black brush set at 90%.  The red shows where I removed the bokeh texture:

 

 

And that’s it!  Here is the After (If you’re on a computer, you can hover to see the Before/After comparison):

 

 

I hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial!!  Do you play around with textures a lot?  Any good tips to share?