Review: Trey Ratcliff’s Texture Tutorial

Tex­tured Capi­tol by William Beem

Ear­lier this year, I took a work­shop on HDR pho­tog­ra­phy in Tampa taught by Trey Rat­cliff and Scott Bourne. Although we went out­side to cap­ture some images, I didn’t find any­thing that really inter­ested me at the Tampa Con­ven­tion Cen­ter. The real rea­son to be there was to learn how Trey crafts his HDR images. Before the work­shop, I took my first HDR shots while on vaca­tion in Las Vegas. Some I liked, some I didn’t, but I could tell there wasn’t really any­thing mag­i­cal about them. Any­one can take mul­ti­ple expo­sures, run them through Pho­tomatix and process the result. There was more to get­ting results like Trey’s, or more impor­tantly, results that I wanted using Trey’s tech­niques. When the class set­tled in Tampa, Trey said “there are no secrets.” He intended to show us exactly how he cre­ated his images and he lived up to his word. Although I would have pre­ferred a bet­ter loca­tion to shoot some images, I thought that I got what I wanted out of the work­shop. I’m still prac­tic­ing those tech­niques to learn how I want to shape my own images, but there is no secret about the technique.

I thought he was also going to go into his tex­ture tuto­r­ial a bit at the work­shop, but that wasn’t the case. No mat­ter, it was billed for HDR and not tex­tures. It’s taken me a while to get around to it, but I finally pur­chased Trey’s Tex­ture Tuto­r­ial last week­end. He offers sev­eral ver­sions, but I opted for the Basic ver­sion (i.e., the cheap­est one). The higher priced ver­sions went up to $400. Quite hon­estly, I wasn’t sure if that pro­vided enough value for me. For the extra money, you get many more tex­tures (150 vs. 25 with the Basic ver­sion) and a cou­ple of bonus videos. One thing I was glad to see is that you can upgrade from the Basic ver­sion if you want to stick your toe in the water first and then upgrade to the full package.

Trey’s video shows you how he works through adding tex­tures to mul­ti­ple images. After the first image is com­plete, you know the basic tech­niques. There’s noth­ing dif­fi­cult about it. Watch­ing him work reminded me of some­thing Scott Kelby men­tions at his work­shops. The steps are easy. You just have to put them together to get the desired result. Quite hon­estly, the steps are sim­ple enough that you almost want to smack your head if you didn’t think of it your­self. Trey’s work with tex­tures is very much like his work with HDR. He demon­strates a lot of the same techniques.

The thing that I found most valu­able was watch­ing him go through var­i­ous images and work through the thought process to cre­ate some­thing. He tells you what he’s think­ing about and why he makes the pro­cess­ing choices applied to each image as he does it. You’ll see him try some­thing, eval­u­ate the result, and then decide. He may toss it aside, tweak it, or keep it. To me, that was the true value in buy­ing the tex­ture tuto­r­ial. I got a peek inside the mind of an artist and learned that I can apply the same tech­niques to my images.

There is some­thing to keep in mind, though. Just because you use Trey’s tech­niques does not mean your pic­tures will sud­denly look like Trey’s. As you go through the process with HDR or tex­tures, you make deci­sions along the way based upon what you like or don’t like. Those deci­sions ulti­mately build the final image. You may not make the same choices that Trey would make, and that’s OK. When you watch him work, you see his choices and you may think “Cool, I like that and I approve of your choice.” That’s easy. When you’re there alone, you’re in charge of the thought processes that craft the image and you may take a dif­fer­ent path. To me, that’s the beauty of learn­ing these tech­niques. It’s not a step-​by-​step process. It’s a frame­work of tools and tech­niques for you to apply as you see fit. The results you get are unique.

The image above is my only attempt so far using Trey’s tex­ture tuto­r­ial. Along the way, I noticed a few dif­fer­ences between watch­ing and doing:

• Trey never had any error mes­sages, but I did. His tex­tures use a dif­fer­ent color space than my images. Be pre­pared to dis­cov­ery some minor incon­sis­ten­cies based upon your set­tings in Photoshop.
• Trey makes very bold changes to his images. Look­ing at my image above, I was very mild with my appli­ca­tion of tex­tures. I think this is some­thing that will likely change as I get more experience.

Let me add a cou­ple of other obser­va­tions while I’m at it:

• Start with a good image. There may be ele­ments of it that you don’t like (blown sky, for exam­ple), but a poor photo is a poor photo, even with a tex­ture on it.
• Exper­i­ment! Don’t be afraid to try some­thing because you aren’t sure if it will look good. Try it out and see if you like it or not. Try vari­a­tions. You may sur­prise your­self. If not, toss it and try some­thing else.

One part of the tuto­r­ial that may not help you with your own work­flow was the music Trey played in the back­ground. It’s a col­lec­tion of music from other parts of the world, but it seems to fit with his over­all Travel theme. There’s some­thing a bit charm­ing about watch­ing him present his tuto­r­ial while a French ver­sion of “Beyond the Sea” (La mer, if you want to search for it on iTunes) plays in the back­ground. I don’t know if all of the songs on his list are iden­ti­fied, but Trey pro­vides his music playlist on his web site. It may be worth check­ing out if you’re in the mood for some­thing different.

The bot­tom line is that his basic tuto­r­ial is very good and I found the value worth the price. I’m not sure that I would say the same about the Plat­inum pack­age for $399, though. That’s partly because I don’t know what new tech­niques he pro­vides in the extra videos, and I’m not sure that the addi­tional 125 tex­tures are worth four times as much as the Basic pack­age. If I ran into some “found money”, it would be worth it for the con­ve­nience fac­tor. I have to admit that he showed some tex­tures in his video that I liked, but they were not part of the Basic pack­age. How­ever, I have a bet­ter idea now of how to go col­lect my own tex­tures. It doesn’t hurt that he trav­els around the world, but I can think of many places around my home that could have sim­i­lar, inter­est­ing tex­tures. Your opin­ion may vary, and that’s fine. Make the choice that works best for your bud­get and sense of value. I may upgrade at some point, but for now, I found great value out of the Basic pack­age and wouldn’t hes­i­tate to rec­om­mend Trey’s Tex­ture Tutorial.

p.s. This is the same image I posted last Fri­day with­out a tex­ture, in case you’d like to com­pare for a Before and After view.