When constructing a water composite, and trying to give it the look and feel of an old, classic painting by adding a texture, the question about when to texturize the composite will come up. For this genre, a model with dark hair in a dark swimsuit works best. Let’s begin with this studio portrait of Indonesian model Karina Cognomen:
Let’s use an image of some nice clouds against a blue sky, such as this HDR image taken in Singapore:
For the texture, let’s again use a Painterly texture from Photomorphis, in this case #7:
The question will invariably come about how to apply the texture. Should you texturize the clouds, then generate the water in Flood 2? Or should you generate the water first, then apply the texture to the entire clouds/water background? To save you the trouble, I have made both versions. Here is the first version, where the texture has been applied to the clouds only, then the water was generated:
Here is the version where to water was generated first, then the texture was applied to the entire background. Notice the clouds look different. That’s because texture had to be stretched to cover the entire background:
I prefer the second version, where the texture is applied after generating the water. It is much simpler. Because we are using the “paint over” technique, we only have to remember apply the color and luminosity of the texture to the model, to assist in unifying her with the background. But we want the texture’s color and luminosity only, not the texture’s detail painted on her. See my blog post of October 6, 2014 about adding textures to a boudoir portrait for information on how to do the “paint over” technique. Still, the texture on the above image looks a little too prominent for my taste. To remedy this, I applied a Gaussian blur of 8.0 pixels to the texture only. This is the final result: