Lessons

Lesson Info

Creating Your Own Textures

There is a special list of filters that will create something out of nothing. A lot of filters simply won't work if you feed them a layer that's empty or a layer that's white. Instead, they rely on a layer having detail, and they only can operate on that detail. But this particular list of filters can create something out of nothing. Either feed it a document that is full of nothing, where it looks like a checkerboard or a layer full of white, uh, and by applying any one of these, we could get a base to start with, to create a texture and so let's, take a look at what we could do, and I have no idea what I'm about to create here because it is going teo be somewhat random, but I'm going to actually create a new document, and I'm just gonna pick one of those filters. Uh, I'm gonna pick clouds just to get some sort of random information to start with, but then we don't have to end up with just clouds. We want to turn this into some sort of a texture, so now we could randomly pick another ...

filter, but usually just going into what's called the filter gallery will give you a nice list of filters where you get some sort of a visual idea of what they would do. And you can just click between them to see how it would end up distorting your clouds into something that doesn't look just like clouds maybe something like that and you can't apply more than one of these filters if you go to the lower right when you're in the filter gallery, this list the filter that you've already applied and if you click on a different filter it will simply switch to that filter. But if you would like to stack one filter on top of another, just come down here and click on this icon, which will now put a different filter on top so I could now now I'm applying this filter in addition to the previous one and I can come over here and click between these two see what kind of results I'm getting and then if I want to apply another one again, I click on that icon and I just continue to experiment untill I like where I'm headed with this when I've done it, just click okay? You can see that I've created some sort of texture in this and let's see what we might deal would do and I end up applying that because sometimes they'll be a little bit on the extreme side and so see if I have a picture, we can apply this to just go back tio this one, I'm gonna just drag this over if use the move tool in photo shop, another way of moving things between documents is instead of copying and pasting, you could just use the move to own clique within your document, drag to the name of another tab, wait for the town to come to the front and then don't like oh, yet because of your mouse is just on top of the tab and you let go. It'll switch you to that picture, but it won't know that you wanted to move that picture in there, you know, drag it over, you have to drag and make sure mouse ends up on top of the actual image that's there. Why let go now? I have it in there, that's just an alternative to copying and pasting the one advantage of dragging and dropping like that is, if this particular layer had any featured applied to it, like blending sliders that limited where it showed up or it had a blending mode on it like overlay mode, or it had a layer style, like a inner glow or something, you would retain it, where's copying and pasting on ly copies. The pixels that make up a layer doesn't copy the accessories applied to the layer, so make any sense this, whereas sometimes dragon and dropping is more convenient. This up is just a little bit smaller than the image or implying it too, so I'm going to type command tea to transform and just get it to be big enough to cover the image now I could use something like overlay mode to apply this but this has quite a bit of contrast in it it's what I choose overlay mode might be a bit much I could always lower the opacity less in it and then it's not so bad that I got a little painterly feel to it or another trick it's only hide the layer that's underneath you just looking at this is if I want the scent give it a little bit of dimension kind of a three dimensional feeling after I've combined some filters could create some sort of a texture I'll come in here and I will choose in boss what's special about the embossed filter is there usually kind of flatten out the look of what you have and I will give you a lot of fifty percent gray in what's special about fifty percent gray is that they're blending modes that are found in the grouping that's in herewith overlay all these bloody modes within this grouping makes fifty percent greg go away so that gray stuff would just go away and with all the bloody modes that air combining herewith overlay mode anything brighter than fifty percent gray will brighten your picture anything darker than fifty percent great will darken your picture so you can get some of this textures look without getting all the grade junk so let's try and picture back on and we can switch between these and see the various looks just knowing that if any of mars who's strong we can always lower the opacity which is what I'm going to do here and then we could paint on the mask or use blending sliders to limit where it shows up so sometimes I'll end up creating my own textures I'll just show you one other example let's create a woven texture hero credit brand new empty layer and for my uh something out of nothing I'm going to use add noise that was one of the other filters on that list now add noise can't work when the layers empty so that just means anything bites or anything just not a checkerboard so all over here and fill this with white had I been working on a brand new document it usually starts off with white so it would have been fine and then I'll do add noise and I'll just get a bunch I don't want any color in my noise all turn on monochromatic got some noise now to make this feel woven weaves usually have ah direction to it usually they're kind of crossed you know one direction and another so I'm gonna go over here and just do motion blur motion blur will move this in a particular direction so if I use the motion blur filter, I'm just gonna bring it up and sell that starts to kind of combined together and it's set in horizontal orientation at the moment and then to weave it I'll just supply the second time, this time reversing the angle ninety degrees so it's going the opposite direction the end result looks way too soft anytime something looks way too soft like that, you could go to the image menu and just choose auto tone or auto contrast and it will give you contrast but you see a little bit of weave in there and just lands before I might come in here and in boss it in there and you start seeing a little bit of a weave look. So what is that that's motion blur on top of ad noise? It's just we did motion blur twice once horizontally once vertically if you want a subtle version, you could leave the height down way to go. The only problem with motion blur is on the edges of the picture. It doesn't have anything beyond the edge to push in when it does the blur, so you're going to end up with a slightly weird edge you could always just scale this make a little bit bigger to fill the area or crop it s o I'm gonna type command tea to transform let's make this a little bigger lower the opacity of its too much, but so you don't have to start with a photograph. You can start with one of a special list of filters which would be these particular filters. They can all create detail out of nothing kind of randomized detail. And then after you apply that start experimenting with the other filters to further distort the result. And if it ends up with too much contrast and it's just too much when you apply, you could try that little trick if m bossing, uh, because that always flattens things out. Kind of mellows it out. And so what I will frequently dio is if I end up creating any, uh, looks I will open up the history panel when I'm done and just take a screenshot to remind me how the heck did I get there? So this particular, uh, texture was created by doing what was it? Add noise, gazi ambler median auto levels. And then in boss, not a lot of us always adds contrast what's the this one I don't remember. It was like, I think, a half tone pattern and then em, boss, uh, this one's clouds dry brush three times in a row in that I'm boss here, you could just see the list. And it's just all I did was copy what was in the history panel and paste it on top of the results so I can remember approximately what to get how I got there that to me looks like stucco, so if you want weird stuff you created as well and then sometimes they forget to copy it, and I just keep the texture to me that looks like so put a carwash being spread in your window, you know, I could tell you that involves chrome, the chrome filter I think so anyway, that gives you some sense for some of the kinds of textures you can create if you experiment ben diesel, you're textures anywhere I don't I figured other people are better creating them than I am and that's why the place is like flypaper. They end up spending time cause they have, like about a dozen different packs, I just don't get around to it, I might maybe one day why don't people asking if so, come snow some together? I mean, I don't know, I think it's just nice with russell's panel there that you can use any textures, so start shooting your own start looking at other companies that do so uh, there are also filters within photoshopped that have texture built into them, and so those are things where if we limit ourselves to a certain set of filters we can just tell it to apply texture let's see here I have texture applied to this which is a subtle kind of canvas field in I didn't just apply this canvas feel I made sure that it did not apply at full strength to the shadows you see in the dark portion of the image you don't see the texture and also in the really really bright areas if I can find any really really bright areas like in the cloud it might be able to show through a little bit but I thought this didn't look bad on this particular image so let's take a look at the filter that was used this is simply a filter called texturizing it's in the filter gallery which means you go to the filter menu and choose filter gallery to access it and all you have is that you click on this thing called texturizing it's under a subcategory of texture and within that you have a pop up menu where you can choose between brick which is pretty useless for most things burlap though is bad although it's a little too repetitive for me as far as you can see that seem innit you have canvas which is rather nice and then you have sandstone I don't mind the sandstone in the campus but if you create your own textures you can have this filter applied as well if you happen to have a seamless texture one that could repeat without seeing the scenes that's what's best because then that doesn't have to be overly large. It could be a smaller texture, but you can use a different texture by going just to the right of this poppet menu there's a little menu there see that little icon right here and you can choose load texture and if you feed it a file on your hard drive, it will apply it in a similar way to this I don't have like a texture already chosen out, but it needs to be in photoshopped file format that's why here when I hit a folder full of j pegs not going to do it needs to be photoshopped file format and it's only going to use shades of gray out of that image um in order to apply it, but when I applied this at full strength, you see the texture in the dark portion of the image. When it's applied generically over the whole thing, I don't like it quit as much. I used the blending sliders remember those little sliders to limit where this affects the image, so let me show you how that was done so anyway, after I applied this, uh, we're actually before I applied it here's what I did here's my original picture underneath without the texture applied I simply duplicated the layer, and then I applied the texture to the duplicate that we have the original underneath the filter, one on top, with the filtered one on top, I went down to the letters fx, and I chose blending options remember those sliders, and I said, hey, get out of the dark part of this! Get out of the bright part of this, and in this particular case, since the layer above, and the layer below are very similar, it wouldn't really matter which of these two sets of sliders I used, because this can hide the texture from the dark part of the layer you're working on, which is the letter contains the texture. This could show the dark parts from what's underneath, but that's kind of identical to the photos are the same, but by doing that, I was able to limit it where it didn't show up in the darkest part of the photograph, and I preferred that look, if I get it, so it does show up in the darkest park has watched this tree so before and after it can see it in the dark areas. I know that will be subtle on the internet, with the compression of video and such, but I like being able to limit it, so there are other filters that will also allow you to apply texture in the same way as that was just a few other options, and those areas filters called rough pastels under painting, and I will butcher this name because I don't know that proper way. Tio, pronounce that it's got what you'd call it. Accent mark above it. Contact crayon. Sure, somebody knows the right way to go pronounce that I don't, uh, and then the texture riser in all of those have similar ways of applying texture.