A relatively new technique or style in photography is popular now, and it's called grunge. It is basically a look that is characterized by a course texture that gives a gritty appearance.  There are several ways of achieving this, and I would like to discuss three of them here. 

 

 

The quickest and easiest method of giving a normal continuous toned image a grunge makeover is to use the tonal contrast filter in Nik Color Efex 3.0.  The Nik color suite of filters has endless possibilities for creating unique and artistic effects, but it is this particular filter that is a great way to create the grunge look.

 

There are three sliders in the dialog box when this filter is chosen, and you can see them below. All you have to do is move the 'midtone contrast' slider all the way to the right.

 

 

The increase in contrast in the midtones of the image is what makes a grunge look.  You can add more of the effect by adjusting the shadow and highlight contrast  sliders as well, but my preference is to only use the midtone slider.  The old truck, above, was done this way.  The colors come from the fact that this was originally an infra-red capture, but the textural quality and the course look of this comes from using the Nik filter

 

If you check the 'Conventional High Pass Contrast' box in the dialog box, additional black and white lines form along the main graphic elements in the image.  This is how I got the unique look of the Dutch windmill composite with the Citroen car, below. 

 

 

Nik HDR

 

Another way to introduce a grunge look is by using one of the presets in Nik HDR Efex Pro.  This software offers many presents that produce some very unique effects (in addition to being able to combine bracketed exposures to create an HDR image).  One of my favorites is granny's attic.  Even though the dialog box offers many sliders to tweak the default effect, I am usually very happy with what the software provides without any further adjustment. The image below is an example. The rough wall was stucco, which already had a pronounced texture, but the grunge filter added to it dramatically.  

 

If you are interested in purchasing any of the Nik filters, you can get a 15% discount by entering the code:  jzuckerman  when you make the purchase. Because I recently did a webinar for Nik software (which should be up on their website within a week), they have extended this discount to my students and subscribers of this newsletter.  

 

   

 

Another way to create a grunge look is to combine images in Photoshop with various textures and then merge them together using one of the 'blend modes'.  Let me explain how to do this.

 

First, you must select images that work well with each other from an artistic standpoint.  Avoid messy, busy combinations without a strong graphic element. I recommend combining images that have strongly defined shapes with a some kind of texture.  You can obtain grunge textures online, and some are free, some have a price tag, and you can also make your own by photographing sand, weathered wood, stucco, chipped cement, chipped paint, scratched metal, and so on.

 

See the two images below.  The portrait in India has good graphic elements (the features of the subject) and the grunge texture was part of a package I bought from this website:   http://flypapertextures.blogspot.com/.   

 

I opened both images in Photoshop and then selected the texture with Select > all.  I pasted it on top of the portrait with Edit > paste.

 

Next, I went into the layers palette and used the pull down submenu that starts with the word 'normal'.  In the screen capture below, you can see that I chose 'hard light' from the list of options.  That created the composite, lower left. But why stop there?  By choosing another blend mode option, 'divide', I created a very different look, below right. I added no additional color; the effect you see here is simply the way the blend mode combined the images.  You never know how the two images will combine.  This is trial and error, and your artistic taste will dictate what you save and what you ignore.

 

You can also use the opacity slider to vary the effect. 

 

 

 

 

Some blend modes produce a mess, and some are incredible. You have to scroll through them to see (by clicking on the move tool, you can then hold down the Shift key and hit the plus key to quickly scroll down the list of blend modes). 

 

At this point, you can bring one of the blend mode composites back into Nik Color Efex Pro 3.0 or Nik HDR Efex Pro for further work. That's what I did with the photo below of a Javanese bride from Indonesia.