Textures and blending creating a natural look

An art method I'm eager to improve on in my work in using images in a scene and blending them nicely so it's hard to identify what's an image and what's painted. With my work currently I find it very obvious where I've used textures to help construct an image. The reason for this is not knowing how to blend them in well enough to match the paintings colour. If I do attempt to use textures the extent of my knowledge has been adjusting the opacity and using the set blend layers (Overlay, soft light, hardmix ect) so most of the time it's difficult to use a variety of textures and have them look like they fit together. 

I've started looking at ways to textures more effectively in my work as one thing I look to improve on is the time it takes to create a painting and it's generally known that most artists working in the industry would use some form of photo texturing at some point to help speed up the work.

Firstly I looked at Match colour:

So match colour can be used to help make two reference images a similar colour quickly. By going into the image adjustments tab you can access what layer you want to match the colour from and also adjust the sliders so you can make it more faded if it's going to be in the distance or more vibrant.


Colour look up - colour look up can give your texture a preset look. for example 'crisp warm', 'crisp cold', 'dropblues' and a lot of other options.

As seen here colour look up can change the over all feel of the texture so that it can give the artist more freedom of what reference images they use. an example being finding a really nice texture but it feels too warm for the image your painting. with the color look ups set defaults it allows you to change the over all look of where this texture has been taken from. 

Pattern Stamp I've found a new use for pattern stamp! by just simply clipping an overlay layer to the texture and selecting a pattern with some tones and colours you want to introduce to the texture it's a really fast and great way to start adding more colour and excitement to the texture. 

As its a stamp tool it allows the painter to choose where they want the changes to apply instead of affecting the whole image so if you like the main colour of the texture your using but want to introduce some extra colour here and there this allows you to do it with ease and also maintaining the texture because it's overlaid. With a few of these I pushed it a bit further by adjusting the overlays Hue,Saturation and lighting (cntrl - U) to either pop the colours out more or dim them down with the saturation. Change the colours completely with Hue and simply darken or lighten the layer.

I want to do more research into using images and textures in my work effectively. One thing I want to be careful of though is not letting it change my style completely. I'm aware my images might look a little different with them but I want to maintain the loose feeling I have with my work currently as I still find it helps my work look more alive.

I know a lot of artists tend to use masking layers within their work to help paint in textures where they want them to be, I feel like this will also be an interesting and more painterly way of including textures into my work so I'll be looking into that next.