NZPhotographer Issue 53, March 2022

MAKING YOUR OWN GRUNGES
Photographing concrete to create a scuffed
gravely texture is a good place to start when
making your own grunges. You can also look at
taking images of grainy wood, spikey grass, clouds,
candy floss, or just about anything to make a good
overlay – Have fun experimenting!
Once you have your grunge overlay, whether
you’ve downloaded it or created your own, take
the image and open it in Lightroom or Photoshop.
Then you have a few options... You can keep or
change the colour depending on what you’re using
it for.
Here I am using concrete and I have desaturated
the colour. Desaturate concrete? Well, believe
it or not you have blue and brown hues in most
concrete and desaturating it makes sure those
colours will not interfere with the colours in your
image that it will be overlayed on.
My concrete photo after desaturation can be
seen below. It will make a nice textured overlay.
The image I am going to put it on is of a group
of kids on day 3 of a gruelling basketball trial for
representative teams. You can see the original at
the top of page 73. They are walking along the
court with their teen coach to start the warm up
session. I wanted to capture how tired everyone
was but also the fact that they were gritty and
determined to keep going. Unfortunately, my
original image has a lot of noise in it - the light
reflecting off the polished floors makes shooting on
courts hard without some extra kit like filters and
reflectors. So while I could have shot a picture of an
old rail car with graffiti and popped a grunge over
it to look nice and atmospheric, I chose to use a
grunge to reflect emotion instead.
First, I changed my image of the subjects to black
and white and turned down the yellow hues in
Photoshop. I then popped the concrete on top of
the image. Then I clicked lighten in the blending
modes – I recommend trying them all to see which
best suits.
Next, I wound the opacity back to 50%. I then went
over the subjects in the grunge layer with an eraser
on a very light setting and wiped grunge off faces
and bodies – The end result is seen below right.
64 March 2022 NZPhotographer