Adobe® Photoshop® CS2 Studio Techniques

Creating the Background Texture

Now I was ready to tackle the background behind the head. The pattern applied to the head was the same used for the background, so I duplicated the pattern layer, dragged it to the bottom of the Layers palette and scaled and positioned it to fill most of the white space at the bottom of the image (Figure 15.168). At this stage, the head and the background contained similar colors, and I needed to completely shift the color of the background. I did this by holding Option (Mac) or Alt (Windows), choosing Gradient Map from the Adjustment Layer pop-up menu at the bottom of the Layers Palette (for more information about Gradient Map adjustments, check out Chapter 10, “Color Manipulation), and turning on the Use Previous ...