Photoshop

Wood textures with Photoshop

Wood textures with Adobe Photoshop

I needed to try out some wood textures for a possible up and coming project, so I set myself to work finding tutorials which would assist me in doing so. I found two good ones:

So, I had a play around, and created a hybrid version using the two tutorials as guides.

Here is my method (of course, huge credit goes to the two tutorials mentioned above!):

  1. Open up a nice big new canvas in Photoshop; it depends on how big you want the texture, but mine was 1000 x 1000px so I had a lot of space to play with.
  2. Set foreground colour to white and background colour to black.
  3. Go to Filter > Render > Clouds and you should see some rough cloud shapes, similar to below: Photoshop Clouds filter
  4. Go to Filter > Blur > Motion Blur and set the angle to vertical or horizontal, depending on which direction you’d like the wood grain to run (or even diagonal if you’d prefer), and the distance to 999px: Photoshop Motion Blur filter
  5. Go to Filter > Brush Strokes > Accented Edges and set edge with to 2, edge brightness to 42 and smoothness to 4: Photoshop Accented Edges filter
  6. Go to Filter > Artistic Filters > Dry Brush and set brush size to 2, brush detail to 9 and texture to 2: Photoshop Dry Brush filter
  7. Go to Filter > Artistic Filters > Film Grain and set grain to 1, highlight area to 0 and intensity to 0: Photoshop Film Grain filter
  8. Choose the colour of your wood by going to Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation, set it to colorize and drag the sliders around to get the colour you require, then to improve the contrast, go to Image > Adjustments > Levels and adjust the sliders to your heart’s content. It’s probably a good idea to get a reference image for the wood type you are going for to get an accurate hue: Colouring the wood texture with Hue/Saturation in Photoshop Adjusting the levels of the wood texture in Photoshop
  9. Go to Filter > Liquify and use the turbulence tool to curve some of the lines: Turbulence tool within the Liquify filter in Photoshop to create curved lines
  10. Still in liquify mode, use the bloat tool to expand any possible knot locations, then use the Twirl tool on that same area to create a swirled area for the knot. Again, for this step it is a good idea to get an image of the wood type you are aiming for to get the correct number and size of possible knots for a more realistic feel: Bloat tool within the Liquify filter in Photoshop to create spots for knots in the wood Twirl tool within the Liquify filter in Photoshop to create the appearance of knots in the wood texture
  11. Add a new layer and fill it with a darker colour from your range.
  12. Go to Filter > Render > Fibers with a variance of 28 and a strength of 50: Photoshop Fibers filter applied to a new layer
  13. Set the layer style to screen and reduce the opacity to about 10-15% so the fibre pattern adds extra texture to the wood: Reduced opacity of the Fibers layer
  14. Erase parts of the fibre layer where the knots are: Finished wood grain texture