Creating textures (in Photoshop)
Thanks to colorfilter's recent Texture Challenge, I have been playing around at making textures lately, and thought some of you might be interested in looking at this one of the many, many ways you can go about creating your own textures.
This tutorial was done in PS CS (on a Mac). If you have a different version of PS, you may have more or fewer filters; if you have PS Elements, some of the adjustment layer (and other) options may not be available. If you have PSP or GIMP, the details will obviously be different, but the basic ideas may inspire you. I've included some explanatory notes for beginners, which those who know their way around can skip.
Start with a photo. It can be of anything, but I recommend something fairly 'busy'. I've created textures using photos I took of (a) a red-leaf Japanese maple bush (maple base), and (b) some plants and grass in my own back garden (green base).
Resultant texture sets are here and here.
For this tutorial, I'm going to use a photo of a stony path. This is an extract from the image-I'm not posting the whole thing, which would make this tutorial unreasonably vast.
Doesn't look or sound very promising, I dare say, but I've already had a play and I'm enchanted with the results.
I recommend shrinking your photo to a usable size, something in the region of 800 x 600 pixels (at 72 pixels/inch, please) should be reasonably convenient. Or select an interesting piece of your photo and work from that.
I like to start as follows:
duplicate layer, add Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur (at about 4.5, in this case),
duplicate original layer, set to soft light x 2, duplicate again
merge the visible layers (command+alt+shift+E)
This is now the Base Layer.
Then, apply variations to new Base Layer:
-Levels, adjustment layer. With this photo, the Base Layer was very much bell-curve shaped, so I moved the end sliders a little way towards the middle, then merged the adjustment layer with a copy of the base layer. This has given me another Base Layer, ( I called it Base Layer LA, for Levels Adjusted), for more variety.
-I made yet another Base Layer by adding a Curves adjustment layer, in which I changed the Red to an elongated S-shaped curve, which altered the colour quite happily. Again, merged the copy of the base layer with the Curves layer to create the variation.
Base Layer with Levels Adjusted
Base Layer with Curves Adjusted
[Note for Beginners: Not sure what I mean by 'adjustment layer'? Look at the bottom of your Layers Palette. There are little icons there, and third from the right is a circle, half black, half white. Click on it, to get a drop-down menu of adjustment layers. Just select the kind you want. It can be a quick way of getting a new Color Fill layer, as Solid Color is the first option on the menu, and there are various other options.
If you select Levels, you'll get a screen which shows you a graph representing what we may call 'the amount of darkness' in the picture. There's a black slider on the left end of the base of the graph, a grey one in the centre, a white one on the right. Move a slider to the right, the picture gets darker. Move a slider to the left, it gets lighter. If your graph is a tall hump in the centre and very low on either side, move the black and white cursors a little way towards the centre - the dark bits will get darker, the light bits will get lighter. Loosely speaking. Your image will preview the effect, so fiddle with the sliders until you find something you like.
If you select Curves, you'll get a linear graph, and a drop-down menu at the top which will be showing RGB. I changed this to Red, and pulled the graph line upward at about the three-quarter mark, then pulled the line downward at about the one-quarter mark, turning the straight line into an elongated S-shape, and rendering my picture quite a lot pinker. Try it out and see.]
Now, it's time for various filters. Duplicate one of your Base Layers, and apply something from the Filters menu to it. If you haven't used the filters before, stick with the default setting and see what happens, then duplicate your Base Layer again and try the same filter, but play about with the settings and find out what the differences are. You can always delete filtered layers that you think are boring.
[Note for Beginners: all you need to do is select the filter of your choice from the Filters menu. You'll be offered some kind of selection screen with options, so just follow through logically. There isn't always a preview screen, but if you hate the effect, press command-Z and it will be undone.]
I don't think there's any need to present images of all the filter results - try them for yourself and you will see what can be achieved. Filters I used, using randomly any of my three Base Layers (all found in the Filters menu):
Texture>Texturizer>Canvas
Texture>Texturizer>Patchwork
Artistic>Colored Pencil
Artistic>Underpainting
BrushStroke>Ink Outline
Brushstroke>Spatter
Distort>Wave
Distort>Glass>tiny lens
Distort>Glass>blocks (size adjusted to 100%)
Liquefy, using a fairly large brush (then duplicate layer, set to Hard Light, merge with Liquefy layer)
The above list is by no means exhaustive, but I don't think there's much mileage in using every possible variation-you have to eat sometime, after all. Pick something that you think sounds interesting, and see how it looks. Try not to get into a rut, as filters will have different effectiveness on different images. I do strongly recommend putting a Distort>Wave layer into the mix somewhere, as you can get some gorgeous effects. Beyond that, it's up to you.
Sometimes I will also add a gradient, preferably a fancy one with several different colours. Try setting it to Radial, and pull a line from one corner to the opposite, then set the Gradient to colour burn. Then try something completely different.
Keep on duplicating your Base Layer(s) and adding filters until you have an interesting selection.
Then, time to make icon-sized textures
My system.
(a) set selection box to 100 x 100 fixed size, and
(b) set selection box to 200 x 200 fixed size, and at the end of the process, change Image Size to 100 x 100
Do some of both.
Thus:
Select a promising area, cut, paste into new document. (ie command-C, command-N, click Okay, command-V). Or Crop, if that is your preference. I got into the C&P groove too long ago to change now!
(x) If you can make interesting selections from your various filtered layers, this will give you a bunch of textures.
You can play further by adding duplicate layers on different blend modes, adjustment layers, or other effects, like this:
- add a Vivid Light layer
-add an adjustment layer
-or even a filter effect (here, I duplicated the selection, applied a radial blur filter, then masked off a diagonal swipe from the radial blur layer)
(y) If you feel like experimenting further, make a selection in your main document, create a new document and paste the selection into it; then-keeping the selection box in the main document in the same place-change layer, c & p the new selection into the same new document as the first one. Collect several different styles in one new document.
Then mask off various layers, and paint out part of the layer to reveal what is in the next layer down. Maybe add in a black or white background layer, and mask to reveal part of that. When you've got an effect you like, Merge Visible into a new layer, then duplicate that layer into a new document (or you may forget it is there, and lose it) and have another go.
[Beginners' Note: To mask off part of your layer, click on the second-from-left of those little icons at the bottom of the Layers palette. It looks like a little camera. This will add a layer mask to whichever layer you have selected at the time. Your Foreground/Background colours will now be Black/White, so use a brush to paint, in black, over the layer. The black will show up in the Mask square, and will hide that part of the layer and reveal what is underneath. Incidentally, if you duplicate a layer with a Mask, the mask will also be duplicated. If you merge a layer with a Mask, the masking will be incorporated. Have a look at Layer 3, Layer 3 copy 2, and Layer 3, hard light duplicate, over black color fill, in the Layer Palette below.
To Merge Visible, create a new layer-quickest way is to click on the little square icon second from the left-then command+alt+shift+E.]
This Layer Palette shows you what I mean. The selections taken from the main document are Layer 1, 2, 3 etc, and where I have combined layers, I have indicated what was done. (Image 7) I really like the 'layer 6 over Background' one.
I recommend that the best way to play with this is repeat step (x) until you have got all the variety you think you need in the way of simple textures, then go on to step (y) and create several different documents each containing a selection of layers sampled from the same point in the main document. Then play with masking, to blend differently textured layers into something new.
Experiment on both simple and complex sets with adding duplicate layers on alternative blend modes. Adding a Vivid Light or Color Burn layer gives you a more vibrant, contrasted effect, for instance. Mask off parts of the image, to an underlying black or white-I like to use a variety of brushes for the masking, often a large soft brush, sometimes a speckle brush or a sponge-like textured one. And of course there is no reason why you shouldn't add another filter, or a gradient, or a gradient map, to your icon-sized document. Invert is neat, too. A Gaussian Blur layer set to screen, or overlay, is likely to be effective, with perhaps a duplicate of the base above it set to Soft Light. Or how about picking out a colour from within the texture, and using a brush or two on top (in a New layer, always)? There's no shortage of possibilities-the real difficulty is stopping!
Some examples from the set I made from the stone path:
When you've finished, assemble all the textures you've created, and decide which ones are really worth keeping. Be ruthless. Can you imagine using them? Are they things of beauty? Discard any that don't fit the criteria, then flatten the images and save as .png files. It's a good idea to incorporate your LJ name into the filename, then if you decide to share your textures, it's easy for people to figure out whom to credit.
This tutorial was done in PS CS (on a Mac). If you have a different version of PS, you may have more or fewer filters; if you have PS Elements, some of the adjustment layer (and other) options may not be available. If you have PSP or GIMP, the details will obviously be different, but the basic ideas may inspire you. I've included some explanatory notes for beginners, which those who know their way around can skip.
Start with a photo. It can be of anything, but I recommend something fairly 'busy'. I've created textures using photos I took of (a) a red-leaf Japanese maple bush (maple base), and (b) some plants and grass in my own back garden (green base).
Resultant texture sets are here and here.
For this tutorial, I'm going to use a photo of a stony path. This is an extract from the image-I'm not posting the whole thing, which would make this tutorial unreasonably vast.
Doesn't look or sound very promising, I dare say, but I've already had a play and I'm enchanted with the results.
I recommend shrinking your photo to a usable size, something in the region of 800 x 600 pixels (at 72 pixels/inch, please) should be reasonably convenient. Or select an interesting piece of your photo and work from that.
I like to start as follows:
duplicate layer, add Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur (at about 4.5, in this case),
duplicate original layer, set to soft light x 2, duplicate again
merge the visible layers (command+alt+shift+E)
This is now the Base Layer.
Then, apply variations to new Base Layer:
-Levels, adjustment layer. With this photo, the Base Layer was very much bell-curve shaped, so I moved the end sliders a little way towards the middle, then merged the adjustment layer with a copy of the base layer. This has given me another Base Layer, ( I called it Base Layer LA, for Levels Adjusted), for more variety.
-I made yet another Base Layer by adding a Curves adjustment layer, in which I changed the Red to an elongated S-shaped curve, which altered the colour quite happily. Again, merged the copy of the base layer with the Curves layer to create the variation.
Base Layer with Levels Adjusted
Base Layer with Curves Adjusted
[Note for Beginners: Not sure what I mean by 'adjustment layer'? Look at the bottom of your Layers Palette. There are little icons there, and third from the right is a circle, half black, half white. Click on it, to get a drop-down menu of adjustment layers. Just select the kind you want. It can be a quick way of getting a new Color Fill layer, as Solid Color is the first option on the menu, and there are various other options.
If you select Levels, you'll get a screen which shows you a graph representing what we may call 'the amount of darkness' in the picture. There's a black slider on the left end of the base of the graph, a grey one in the centre, a white one on the right. Move a slider to the right, the picture gets darker. Move a slider to the left, it gets lighter. If your graph is a tall hump in the centre and very low on either side, move the black and white cursors a little way towards the centre - the dark bits will get darker, the light bits will get lighter. Loosely speaking. Your image will preview the effect, so fiddle with the sliders until you find something you like.
If you select Curves, you'll get a linear graph, and a drop-down menu at the top which will be showing RGB. I changed this to Red, and pulled the graph line upward at about the three-quarter mark, then pulled the line downward at about the one-quarter mark, turning the straight line into an elongated S-shape, and rendering my picture quite a lot pinker. Try it out and see.]
Now, it's time for various filters. Duplicate one of your Base Layers, and apply something from the Filters menu to it. If you haven't used the filters before, stick with the default setting and see what happens, then duplicate your Base Layer again and try the same filter, but play about with the settings and find out what the differences are. You can always delete filtered layers that you think are boring.
[Note for Beginners: all you need to do is select the filter of your choice from the Filters menu. You'll be offered some kind of selection screen with options, so just follow through logically. There isn't always a preview screen, but if you hate the effect, press command-Z and it will be undone.]
I don't think there's any need to present images of all the filter results - try them for yourself and you will see what can be achieved. Filters I used, using randomly any of my three Base Layers (all found in the Filters menu):
Texture>Texturizer>Canvas
Texture>Texturizer>Patchwork
Artistic>Colored Pencil
Artistic>Underpainting
BrushStroke>Ink Outline
Brushstroke>Spatter
Distort>Wave
Distort>Glass>tiny lens
Distort>Glass>blocks (size adjusted to 100%)
Liquefy, using a fairly large brush (then duplicate layer, set to Hard Light, merge with Liquefy layer)
The above list is by no means exhaustive, but I don't think there's much mileage in using every possible variation-you have to eat sometime, after all. Pick something that you think sounds interesting, and see how it looks. Try not to get into a rut, as filters will have different effectiveness on different images. I do strongly recommend putting a Distort>Wave layer into the mix somewhere, as you can get some gorgeous effects. Beyond that, it's up to you.
Sometimes I will also add a gradient, preferably a fancy one with several different colours. Try setting it to Radial, and pull a line from one corner to the opposite, then set the Gradient to colour burn. Then try something completely different.
Keep on duplicating your Base Layer(s) and adding filters until you have an interesting selection.
Then, time to make icon-sized textures
My system.
(a) set selection box to 100 x 100 fixed size, and
(b) set selection box to 200 x 200 fixed size, and at the end of the process, change Image Size to 100 x 100
Do some of both.
Thus:
Select a promising area, cut, paste into new document. (ie command-C, command-N, click Okay, command-V). Or Crop, if that is your preference. I got into the C&P groove too long ago to change now!
(x) If you can make interesting selections from your various filtered layers, this will give you a bunch of textures.
You can play further by adding duplicate layers on different blend modes, adjustment layers, or other effects, like this:
- add a Vivid Light layer
-add an adjustment layer
-or even a filter effect (here, I duplicated the selection, applied a radial blur filter, then masked off a diagonal swipe from the radial blur layer)
(y) If you feel like experimenting further, make a selection in your main document, create a new document and paste the selection into it; then-keeping the selection box in the main document in the same place-change layer, c & p the new selection into the same new document as the first one. Collect several different styles in one new document.
Then mask off various layers, and paint out part of the layer to reveal what is in the next layer down. Maybe add in a black or white background layer, and mask to reveal part of that. When you've got an effect you like, Merge Visible into a new layer, then duplicate that layer into a new document (or you may forget it is there, and lose it) and have another go.
[Beginners' Note: To mask off part of your layer, click on the second-from-left of those little icons at the bottom of the Layers palette. It looks like a little camera. This will add a layer mask to whichever layer you have selected at the time. Your Foreground/Background colours will now be Black/White, so use a brush to paint, in black, over the layer. The black will show up in the Mask square, and will hide that part of the layer and reveal what is underneath. Incidentally, if you duplicate a layer with a Mask, the mask will also be duplicated. If you merge a layer with a Mask, the masking will be incorporated. Have a look at Layer 3, Layer 3 copy 2, and Layer 3, hard light duplicate, over black color fill, in the Layer Palette below.
To Merge Visible, create a new layer-quickest way is to click on the little square icon second from the left-then command+alt+shift+E.]
This Layer Palette shows you what I mean. The selections taken from the main document are Layer 1, 2, 3 etc, and where I have combined layers, I have indicated what was done. (Image 7) I really like the 'layer 6 over Background' one.
I recommend that the best way to play with this is repeat step (x) until you have got all the variety you think you need in the way of simple textures, then go on to step (y) and create several different documents each containing a selection of layers sampled from the same point in the main document. Then play with masking, to blend differently textured layers into something new.
Experiment on both simple and complex sets with adding duplicate layers on alternative blend modes. Adding a Vivid Light or Color Burn layer gives you a more vibrant, contrasted effect, for instance. Mask off parts of the image, to an underlying black or white-I like to use a variety of brushes for the masking, often a large soft brush, sometimes a speckle brush or a sponge-like textured one. And of course there is no reason why you shouldn't add another filter, or a gradient, or a gradient map, to your icon-sized document. Invert is neat, too. A Gaussian Blur layer set to screen, or overlay, is likely to be effective, with perhaps a duplicate of the base above it set to Soft Light. Or how about picking out a colour from within the texture, and using a brush or two on top (in a New layer, always)? There's no shortage of possibilities-the real difficulty is stopping!
Some examples from the set I made from the stone path:
When you've finished, assemble all the textures you've created, and decide which ones are really worth keeping. Be ruthless. Can you imagine using them? Are they things of beauty? Discard any that don't fit the criteria, then flatten the images and save as .png files. It's a good idea to incorporate your LJ name into the filename, then if you decide to share your textures, it's easy for people to figure out whom to credit.