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Learn how to apply an urban color effect and use brushes to give your photos a unique look. This Photoshop tutorial will introduce you to the Hue/Saturation tool and downloading and using brushes to add texture to your photos.

Artistic Grunge Photo Effect Photoshop Tutorial

Step 1

Open a photo that you want to edit. A nice photo to start off with is a portrait.

Step 2

In the Layers palette, click on the   button. This will open a menu that shows all the adjustment layers available. Select Hue/Saturation and a new Hue/Saturation adjustment layer will be created.

The Hue/Saturation tool will appear. Click OK for now to exit because we will need to change the blending mode before we edit it.

Step 3

You should see a new layer called Hue/Saturation in your Layers palette. Click on the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and change the blending mode to Overlay.

Step 4

Double click on the adjustment layer thumbnail. This will bring up  the Hue/Saturation tool again where you can edit the settings.

In the Hue/Saturation tool, first, checkmark the colorize option near the bottom right. Then, set the saturation to 50 and lightness to 0. Finally, adjust the hue slider until you get the color effect like the image below where skin tones are bleached with a slight blue color cast in the eyes.

Here's what the image looks like so far.

Step 5

Create a new layer by clicking on the button in the Layers palette. You should have a new layer called Layer 1 as the top layer. This layer will hold the grunge texture that will be used to add more attitude in the photo.

Step 6

Now, you will need to download some grunge brushes. You can browse for grunge brushes at Brusheezy.

Download several brushes and load them into Photoshop. You can also pick and download the brush as you are painting. To load the brushes, select the tool from the tools palette on the left. Then, on the top of the option bar, click on the    button and a panel will appear. In the panel, click on the button and select Load Brushes.

A window will appear asking you to browse and load the brush. Browse for the brush that you downloaded, select it, then click Load.

Now you should see in your brush palette the new brushes you added at the bottom of the list.

Step 7

Painting is where you can express your creativity. It is totally up to you to decide what you want to do at this step, but I'll explain what I did.

First, I changed the opacity of the brush to 50% and the brush color to white. I painted using a variety of brushes and size to get results shown in the image below.

Next, I switched the brush color to black and, with the opacity still at 50%, painted with a brick texture to get an image like below. Don't worry if it covers the face. Focus on creating the texture.

Step 8

The texture is covering the entire image and now we'll make it more subtle. First, add a layer mask to the texture layer by clicking on the   button in the Layers palette.

Step 9

Choose Image > Apply Image. Use the settings from the image below. You should select Background as the layer, checkmark the invert option, and make sure that the blending is multiply.

This is what the image looks like so far. The texture is covering the face so in the next step, we're going to mask out the texture from the face.

Step 10

Select the tool and choose a large brush with a softness of 0. Start painting over the face or any area where you don't want the texture to appear.

Here's what the image looks like now.

Step 11

Now we'll tint the texture layer. First, click on the texture layer thumbnail in the Layers palette.

Choose Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation. With the Hue/Saturation tool, we can tint the layer to any color that we want. First, checkmark the colorize option near the bottom right. Then, adjust the settings to get the color results that you like.

Final Results