Create a Wood Texture – Photoshop Tutorial

Create a Wood Texture – Photoshop Tutorial

If you caught my last tutorial, you know that Nathaniel from Tutvid.com and I have teamed up to bring you a series of tutorials inspired by 365PSD.com. A site where you can download completely free PSD files for you to use in your projects. Today’s tutorial has been inspired by the Beautiful Wood Texture PSD file, which again, you can download at 365PSD.com. We’re not going to create this exact texture, instead, I’m going to show you how to create the wood texture that you see below.

Step 1:

The size of your starting document is up to you. I’m starting off with a 1280 by 720 pixel document.

Step 2:

The first thing we need to do is set the base color for the wood. When choosing your colors, make sure they are slightly lighter than you want the final result to turn out.

– For the foreground color, I choose a redish/orange color: #9e6945.

– The background color will be a darker version of the foreground color: #5e3f2b

Step 3:

Once the colors are set, grab your Gradient Tool from the Tools Bar, and at the top, on your Options Bar, make sure that the gradient is set to Foreground to Background, and that Radial is the selected gradient.

Step 4:

Now drag out a gradient starting near the top of your document, right to the bottom. You’ll be left with a nice radial gradient on your document.

Step 5:

Now that the color is set, let’s create our planks. These are simply rectangles which you can make using the Rectangle Tool in your Tools Bar.

Step 6:

One you drag out the first rectangle, you can quickly duplicate the rest across the document by grabbing your Move Tool, then holding down your Alt key on Windows, Option key on the Mac, and dragging. If you have the Snap option turned on, under the View menu, your duplicated rectangle should nicely snap to the edges of the previous one. Your document should be completely filled with the planks.

Step 7:

Once the planks have filled up your document, let’s apply a few Layer Styles to one of the planks. Double-clicking on one of the layers will bring up our Layer Styles Dialogue box. In the Blending Options section, the only option we want to adjust, is the Fill Opacity. Turn that right down to 0% so we can see straight through it.

Step 8:

Now add a Bevel and Emboss using the following settings:

Step 9:

Finally, let’s add a subtle Drop Shadow.

Step 10:

Once one plank’s Layer Styles are complete, we can easily copy it to the other planks. Right-click on the layer we just worked on and Copy the Layer Styles. Now, clicking selecting the top most plank, hold down your Shift key, then click on the bottom most plank layer. This will select all the layers in-between. From here, you can right-click on any of them, and Paste the Layer Styles. Certainly saves a lot of time!

Step 11:

To create the texture, create a new layer and make sure it’s on top of all your current layers. Once it’s created, fill it with white. When that’s done, head up to the Filter menu, down to Noise, and Add Noise. Set the Amount to around 40%, Gaussian for the Distribution and keep Monochromatic checked on.

Step 12:

Now, to create vertical grain, we need to add a Motion Blur. Head back up to the Filter menu, down to Blur, then Motion Blur. Here, you want to set the Angle at 90 degrees, with the Distance all the way to the right.

Step 13:

When you accept the filter, you might notice that the middle is slightly lighter than the top and bottom. To correct this, apply the filter two or three more times. This can quickly be done using the Command/Ctrl + F shortcut.

Step 14:

Obviously, wood isn’t this perfect. We need to add variation to the texture. Let’s add one more Filter. Last time, head back up to Filter > Sketch > Chrome. I found that a Detail value of 3 and a Smoothness value of 10 works well, but play around with the settings to see what you like.

Step 15:

When the Filter is applied, to blend the texture with the other elements, change the Blend Mode of this layer to Linear Burn. That’s looking a lot better!

There you have it, a wood texture in Photoshop! For more tutorials, make sure to check out IceflowStudios.com! And remember, Nathaniel and I posting a minimum of 4 tutorials per week. So make sure you’re following both us us on Twitter and Facebook. Take care!