Here’s a quick way to add a grungy look to your photos by applying a texture overlay in Photoshop.

This is our starting image by eryoni…

by eryoni

The first thing to do is to create a new layer and paste our texture into it. I’m going to use this photograph of some corrugated cardboard for my texture. If you want to use the same texture, you can download this image here.

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Resize and position the texture layer so that it covers your image and is at the scale you want then set the blend mode of the texture layer to Overlay.

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texture-grunge-4That’s a bit more grungy. Notice that because we used an Overlay blend mode, the brown of the cardboard has warmed the tones of the original photo as well as giving us a cardboard texture. If you don’t want any of the colour of your texture layer to be applied to the original image the you can desaturate it or apply a Black and White adjustment layer to the texture layer only by holding the Alt key and clicking the line between the B&W adjustment layer and the texture layer. I did this and then set the blend mode of the Black and White adjusment layer to Overlay as well as shown to the right to give a stronger grunge effect. Here’s the final grungy photo…

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