Create a Wood Texture

Quick reference

• 00:04 I'm going to show you how to create this texture here in a few simple steps.
• 00:06 The size of you're starting document is completely up to
• 00:10 you.
• 00:10 I'm starting off with a 1280 by 720 pixel document.
• 00:14 The first thing we need to do is set the base color for the wood.
• 00:17 When choosing your colors make sure they're slightly lighter than what you
• 00:20 want for the final result.
• 00:21 For the foreground color, I'm going to choose a reddish orange color.
• 00:25 I'm going to go with 9E 69 45.
• 00:28 Now for the background color, it's going to be the darker version of the foreground
• 00:32 color: 5E 3F 2B.
• 00:35 With the colors set, grab your Gradient tool from the Tools bar,
• 00:39 and at the top of your Options bar, make sure that the gradient is set to
• 00:42 ’foreground to background’,
• 00:44 and that ‘radio’ is the selected gradient. Now drag out a gradient, starting near the
• 00:48 top of your document right to the bottom.
• 00:49 Good, now that the colors are set, let's create our planks.
• 00:52 These are simply rectangles, which we can make using the Rectangle tool
• 00:56 in your Tools bar.
• 00:57 Once you drag out the first rectangle, you can quickly duplicate the rest across
• 01:00 the document by grabbing the Move tool
• 01:03 and then holding down your ALT key on Windows, Option key on the Mac, and dragging.
• 01:06 If you have the ‘snap’ option turned on under the View menu,
• 01:09 your duplicated rectangle should nicely snap to the edge of the previous one.
• 01:13 Once the planks have filled up your document, let's apply a few layer styles
• 01:16 to one of the planks.
• 01:17 Double clicking on one of the layers will bring up the layer styles dialogue box,
• 01:21 In the Blending Option section, the only option you want to adjust is the
• 01:25 fill opacity.
• 01:25 Turn that right down to 0%, so we can see straight through it.
• 01:28 Now, let’s add ‘bevel and emboss’ to get some depth to our planks.
• 01:32 Keep the style at
• 01:32 inner bevel and the technique at smooth. Now, increase the depth to 200
• 01:36 and the size to 8. Down below, turn off global light,
• 01:40 set the angle at zero degrees and the altitude at 50 degrees.
• 01:44 This controls the direction of your light. For the highlight mode, keep the
• 01:47 color white,
• 01:48 but change the blend mode to Overlay and the opacity to 25%.
• 01:52 For the shadow mode, we're going to use overlay as well, with a 50%
• 01:55 opacity.
• 01:56 Finally, let's add a subtle drop shadow. Change the blend mode to soft light,
• 02:00 the opacity to 60%, the angle to zero degrees,
• 02:04 the distance to 3 and the size to 5.
• 02:07 That will complete our layer styles. Once the plank’s layers styles are complete, we can
• 02:11 easily copy them to the other planks.
• 02:13 Right click on the layer that we just worked on and copy the layer styles.
• 02:16 Now selecting the top-most plank, hold on your Shift key
• 02:19 and then click on the bottom-most plank. This will select all the layers in between.
• 02:23 From here, you can right-click on any of them and paste the layer styles.
• 02:27 This will save you a lot of time, and there you go: wood texture, and...
• 02:30 naaa, I'm just kidding. We still have the most important part to go: the actual texture.
• 02:34 Go ahead and create a new layer, and make sure that it is on top of all your current
• 02:37 layers.
• 02:38 Once it is created, fill it with white. If white is your foreground color, you can
• 02:41 achieve that by pressing D and then
• 02:43 X on your keyboard, or you can use the ALT-Backspace or Option-Delete shortcut.
• 02:47 When that's done, head to the filter menu, down to noise,
• 02:50 and then add noise. Set the amount to around 40%.
• 02:54 Gaussian for the distribution and keep monochromatic checked.
• 02:58 Now, to create vertical grain, we need to add some motion blur.
• 03:01 Head back up to the Filter menu, down to blur, and then choose motion blur.
• 03:05 Here you want to set the angle at 90 degrees with the distance all the way to
• 03:09 the right.
• 03:09 When you accept the filter, you may notice that the middle is slightly lighter
• 03:13 than the top and bottom.
• 03:14 To correct this, apply the filter two or three more times.
• 03:17 This can quickly be done by using the Command or Control 'F' shortcut.
• 03:20 Obviously wood isn't this perfect, so we need to add some variation to the texture.
• 03:24 Let's add one more filter. For the last time, head up to the Filter menu,
• 03:28 down to sketch and then choose chrome. I found that a detail value of three and
• 03:32 a smoothness value of 10 works quite well,
• 03:35 but play around with the settings and see what you like. When the filter is
• 03:38 applied, to blend the texture with the other elements, change the mode for this layer to linear burn.
• 03:42 Thats looking a lot better. From here, you can add a little bit of
• 03:45 noise to the texture, as well as adjustment layers, to tweak the colors if
• 03:48 necessary.
• 03:49 And there you have it.

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