Texture overlays have become very popular in the last few years. I often see a texture added to an image and a blending mode applied and that’s it. You can have much more control than that over the texture effect.

Often times the texture is too strong on the subject and/or has color that is distracting on the subject. Here is an easy way of adjusting the texture layer.

First, you need a definable subject. Make a selection such as the owl in this photograph and Select > Save Selection.

Then you can deselect the marching ants with Ctrl or Cmd D. Now pull your texture into the image file and it will cover it. At this point you can try some blending modes. Multiply, Overlay or Soft Light are what I use most often.

Now Select > Load Selection > Your saved selection (my owl in this case).
Click on Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation – slide the Saturation slider all the way to the left which will pull the color out of the texture, but leave the nice texture like these brush marks.

You can also create a mask and fill with a light gray (or black and adjust opacity) but I was looking for an easier way and found this to work well.