I apologize for the delay with the Daily Texture.  We had a dire situation with our beloved Ziva over the weekend, and unfortunately, she passed away yesterday.  Autumn was her favorite season.  She loved it when the wind would blow the leaves around, and I'm sorry she didn't get to experience it one more time.  

I used Today's Daily Texture on this photo of her taken not long ago on a cool, windy day.  I rotated the texture and positioned it horizontally to do this image.  It was used as a background, and as two layers on top, one in multiply with parts of that layer masked off of her, and the other in soft light, both which I desaturated a little to tone down the yellows.

Filled with bold brushwork and the brilliant colors of a September Sunset, Today's Daily Texture made a perfect choice for the next work of art in my Colorful Expressions series.  I used it on this handsome gorilla, using the same method as described in my YouTube video here, and it gave him just the boost he needed to become as colorful as I wanted him to be!

Today's Daily Texture is another fun one, inspired by our first storm of the fall season yesterday!  Dramatic lighting with autumn tones and some rain make up this fabulous background texture.  I knew exactly what I wanted to use it for, too.  I have several animal photos where the pose is somewhat "blah".  Not exciting enough to publish on their own, these animals work perfect when integrated into a scene like this.  

The original photo I used for this example had three horses - two grazing and one walking {on a rainy day}.  I could SO picture the walking horse in a storm, so I resized him smaller, masked away the background and the other two horses, and placed him on top of today's texture.  Then I duplicated the texture layer and placed it on top, setting it to soft light at 100%.  This layer mode offered a great play between light and dark, but it made the horse too dark.  So, with a BIG, SOFT brush at a lowered opacity, I masked away some of this top layer - from the middle of the sky to just over the horses back.  This brought some light back to the horse and the center of the sky, making my work of photo art look just like I envisioned!

P.S.  Have you checked out The Autumn Collection featuring 65 all new resources on the new website yet?  It's on sale until October 8!

Today's Daily Texture is a minimalist background scene for you to place your subject.  The cool thing about this one is you can keep your subject large in size, or make it smaller.  If larger, it will appear as if the subject is closer -- if smaller, it will appear as if it's farther away.  My original intent when I made this was to place a little white church on top of the hill.  The problem is...I can't find the photo!  Oh, it's here on one of these hard drives somewhere, but honestly, I am horrible with organizing my photos.  In the process of looking for that photo, I stumbled across this guy.

This is probably the biggest buck I've seen at the park I go to regularly.  He was actually standing on the service road which goes to where the rangers are...one of those no entrance roads.  So I had to photograph him from a distance.  It was almost dark, and my original photo was super grainy.  No amount of denoising was going to help that, so instead, I used Topaz Simplify and chose the BuzSim filter, which made him look more painterly and softened all that grain.

After masking away his background and positioning him on the hill, I darkened the area around his feet to better ground him in the grass. Then I duplicated the texture layer and placed it on top, setting it to multiply at about 30%.  And then I duplicated it again, and set the new layer to soft light at 30% to finish out this work.

Today's Daily Texture is filled with a variety of greens, a touch of turquoise blue and a dash of woodsy brown.  I paired this texture with this fawn photo, first using it as a background, and then I placed 2 additional layers of the texture on top - one in multiply mode at about 12% and the other in soft light mode at about 20%.  After merging, I made a large feathered selection of her face area and brightened that just a tad to give her the sweet glow of light on her face.

For the next few Daily Textures, I'm going back to the bright and colorful, with a short series of three, all inspired by gorgeous florals and colors in the garden.  This texture is full of warm colors, with a focus on red and orange.  I've used this one to pair with the next piece in my Colorful Expressions Series, the Giraffe.  I followed the same procedure as I shared in my last video, Working With Bold Colors and Abstract Textures.