Locked lesson.
About this lesson
This tutorial is great for those looking to create a natural tone background for their design. The texture can be further tweaked to create a variety of effects, colors and grain styles.
Exercise files
Download the Photoshop file used in the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.
Create a Wood Texture.psd15.6 MB
Quick reference
Topic
Create a wood grain texture.
When to use
This tutorial is great for those looking to create a natural tone background for their design. The texture can be further tweaked to create a variety of effects, colors and grain styles.
Instructions
Begin a new document and set base color
- Use Gradient Tool to create a gradient color in warm wood colors
- Make the gradient circular with the lighter color at the top
Create planks of wood
- From Tools Bar select the rectangular tool and draw in first plank on left
- Duplicate ALT/Option on more planks, letting them snap to the left each time.
- On one of the plank layers, adjust following sections:
- Blending Options
- Advanced Blending Fill Opacity to 0%
- Bevel and Emboss
- Style: Inner Bevel
- Technique: Smooth
- Depth: 200%
- Size: 8
- Turn off Global Light
- Set angle to 0 degrees
- Altitude: 50 degrees
- Highlight Mode: change to Overlay
- Opacity to 25%
- Shadow Mode: change to Overlay
- Opacity to 50%
- Drop Shadow
- Blend Mode: Soft Light
- Opacity to 60%
- Set angle to 0 degrees
- Distance: 3
- Size 5
Copy the first layer style to all the planks
- Right click the layer and select Copy Layer Style
- Hold down Control or Shift and select all the other planks
- Right click and choose Past Layer Style
The wood grain texture
- Create new layer at the top of the Layer Panel
- Fill with white
- Go to Filter Menu, and ‘Add Noise’ with the amount set to 40%, Gaussian, Monochromatic.
- Go back to Filter Menu, Blur, and then choose Motion Blur
- Angle: 90 degrees, distance 999
- Duplicate the Motion Blur filter a few times
- Go back to Filter drop-down, Sketch, and choose Chrome
- Detail: 3, Smoothness: 10
- Finally: on the layer, change the Blend Mode to Linier Burn
Tip
Add noise and adjust chrome settings to play around with the grain.
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- 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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