Are you tired of looking for wooden background textures for your designs? Are you frustrated because you can't find a specific wooden texture that you need to use in your designs? If you are, why not learn how to create your own wooden background texture in Photoshop. Here is an easy Photoshop tutorial that will only take you about 10 minutes to learn and will end up saving you a lot of time in the long run.
Lately, I've been giving out a lot of free textures so I thought that this tutorial would perfectly compliment your searches. Creating your own wooden texture is fun, easy and you can tweak it until you get exactly what you want.
Here is the final wooden texture design that you are going to create:
Step 1: Setting up the Background
Open a new Photoshop document that is 1024 x 1000px. You want to fill the background with a dark brown colour. To do this, go to Edit -> Fill... and a dialogue box will open. Under Contents -> Use, select Colour... and add your dark brown colour. For this tutorial, I used #604d34.
Step 2: Adding the Fibers
Duplicate the layer that you just created so that now you have two layers that are exactly the same. We are going to add fibers to this second layer. How do you do that? If you look to the bottom of the toolbox to the left of your screen, you will see your foreground and background colours. Click on the foreground square to set the foreground colour. You want to use a lighter brown than you chose to use for your background colour. I used #746045.
Next, go to Filter -> Render -> Fibers. Set the Variance to 20 and the Strength to 50 (feel free to experiment here with the values until you get the fibrous wooden effect that you are looking for). Click OK
This is what you should end up with:
Step 3: Adding the knots
If you want to, you can stop here however, adding a few knots here and there will make you background wooden texture look more realistic. To add knots, first duplicate the fiber layer that you created in Step 2. Go to Filter -> Liquify... On the left side of the dialogue box, you will see several icons. Select the third icon down which is called the Twirl Clockwise Tool. Add the following values:
Brush size: 196
Brush Density: 71
Brush Pressure: 100
Brush Rate: 60
Still inside the dialogue box, position your cursor above your image and create your knots. Experiment here until you are happy with the knots that you have created. Click OK.
You should end up with something like this:
Step 4: Adding the lines that separate each plank
Create a new blank layer. Select your Pen tool and draw out a vertical line on your stage. Set your foreground colour to #735f44. In Paths, go to Stroke Path. This will fill your path with the light brown colour. Delete your path and resize your line using Free Transform (Edit -> Free Transform) until you are happy with its width.
Go to Layer -> Layer Style... add the values below for the Outer Shadow and Inner Shadow.
For the Inner Shadow, I used the colour #443c30. For the Outer Shadow, I used the colour #604d34.
Copy your line as many times as you would like and spread them out across your wooden texture. Congratulations!! It was that easy. Now you have a beautiful wooden texture that can be exactly how you want it.