Today's Daily Texture is another with an abstract touch.  Featuring rich, dark, forest greens and browns, this one is an interesting background to use with a variety of subjects.  I paired it with this Siamang Ape photo.  I thought it suited this small ape perfectly, since, after all, his normal habitat would be swinging from the trees in the forest!

First I used the texture as a background, and then placed it on top as a multiply layer at about 50%.  I masked some of this multiply layer off his body, specifically off his face and head, as I wanted to maintain that lovely backlighting along the top edge of his head.  The original ape photo was quite a bit noisy, so I took the merged image into Topaz Impression.  I duplicated the merged image a couple of times, and ran a couple of custom presets on it, masking away the background on each of those layers, in order to keep the original textured background intact underneath.  With the Topaz Impression painted presets applied to just the ape, I was able to give him a more painterly look to blend better with the textured background.

Sometimes, I like a texture which is more abstract in nature, such as Today's Daily Texture, Bronze and Blue.  It makes things very interesting when paired with something soft, such as this group of vibrant blue Iris flowers.  It takes the original image to a whole new artistic level with its unpredictable strokes and complimentary colors!  I used the texture as a background and also as a soft light layer on top, set to about 50% to achieve this result.

Today's Daily Texture is a darker blue/gray one, with a glorious burst of autumn yellow in the form of a landscape and water reflection.  I paired this texture with one of my bald eagle photos.  After masking away the eagle's background and blending him with the texture underneath, I took the merged image into Corel Painter 16 and painted just the eagle, so he would have a painterly look to go along with the painted texture.  Then I adjusted the colors, boosting the saturation and brightness just a little to expand the overall glow of the image.

Since so many of you have been enjoying the impressionist style free texture I released earlier this week, I decided to do another one, creating a garden like scene using impressionist brushes on top of my original chalk texture.  I placed Miss Dixie Peaches in this makeshift garden, being careful to darken her on the bottom so she blended well with the texture underneath.  And then I placed the texture on top, setting it to soft light at about 50% in order to enrich and brighten the colors a little more.  Something was missing though...so I decided to add in one of my flying birds.  I used a bluebird, so he could blend in with the blue of the sky in the background.  The bird was a little too sharp, so I softened him up, to indicate he was not on the same plane as Dixie.

Today's Daily Texture is so versatile!  It features lovely peachy-orange tones paired with some soft blue-green.  Keep it soft {thinking BABIES and CHILDREN here...sweet kittens and puppies...or even a mist over a lake!}, or darken it up a bit as I did in the example, by using it as overlay layers on top.  I used it as a background for the camel, and then duplicated it twice and placed those layers on top.  The first was set to multiply at about 30% which gave it the darker tones, and the second was set to overlay at 100%, with the saturation reduced on that layer to about 50% less.  This kept the colors under control, but still gave the overall image additional light and deepened colors around the edges.