Step 9: Copy The Texture Image Over To The Original Image

Open the photo you're going to use for your texture. In my case, I'm using the rock texture photo that we saw at the beginning of the tutorial. You should now have your original image and the texture photo open in their own separate document windows on your screen.

Make sure you have the texture photo selected by clicking on it anywhere inside its document window. Then go up to the Layer menu at the top of the screen and choose Duplicate Layer:

This brings up the Duplicate Layer dialog box. I'm going to name my copied layer "texture", although the name isn't that important. What is important is that you select the original image's document as the Destination for the copied layer so that our texture photo appears inside the original photo's document. My original photo is named "texture_mapping.psd", so I'll select it as my destination:

Click OK when you're done to exit out of the dialog box and copy the texture photo over to the original image's document. You can close out of the texture photo's document window at this point, which leaves us with just a single document window open containing both the original photo and the texture photo, with the texture photo now blocking the original image from view. If we look in the Layers panel, we can see that we now have two layers. The original image is sitting on the Background layer, while the texture photo is on a new layer above it:

Step 10: Load The Selection

Here's where we need that selection we created and saved earlier. Photoshop actually saves selections as channels, and if we switch back over to the Channels panel, we can see that our selection appears as a separate channel below the RGB channels. My channel is named "face" because that's what I named it when I saved the selection. To quickly load the selection, hold down your Ctrl (Win) / Command (Mac) key and click directly on the channel's thumbnail:

Switch back over to the Layers panel when you're done. You'll see that the selection outlines have reappeared inside the document, although they may be a little hard to see over the texture:

Step 11: Add A Layer Mask

With the selection loaded, make sure the texture layer is selected in the Layers panel (selected layers are highlighted in blue), then click on the Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel:

This adds a layer mask to the texture layer, and because we had the person's head selected when we added the mask, only the area of the texture photo that fell within the selection remains visible. The rest of the texture layer is now hidden from view:

Step 12: Change The Blend Mode Of The Texture Layer To Overlay

To blend the texture in with the person's face, go up to the Blend Mode option at the top of the Layers panel and change the blend mode from Normal (the default setting) to Overlay:

The texture now blends in nicely with the man's face. Feel free to try other blend modes as well, like Multiply or Hard Light, and compare the results you get, but the Overlay mode is often your best choice for this effect:

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