Photoshop® Custom Textures - Part One

Obtaining Textures For Your Images

This first tutorial on the subject of textures illustrates how to take advantage of a feature in Photoshop® that allows the loading of textures via the command:

Filter > Texture > Texturizer > Load Texture

Before you can load any textures, you have to obtain them or create them. Adobe includes several textures on the Photoshop Application CD-ROM disk. In the GOODIES folder on the CD there is a sub-folder called TEXTURES. Simply drag and drop this folder onto your hard disk. You may put it in the Photoshop application folder, but this is not required.

Textures are simply Photoshop grayscale .PSD files from which the texture information is applied with the above filter. It is not required that the image be saved in grayscale format. The texture can just as well be saved in color although Photoshop only uses the grayscale data in the file. There is an advantage to saving it in grayscale format to save disk space.

Because these texture files are simply grayscale images, this offers great flexibility in obtaining and/or cloning them. One great source for textures is Paint Shop Pro™ 5.0. If you accepted the default folders during the installation of Paint Shop Pro 5.0 on your system there will be a folder:

C:\Program Files\Paint Shop Pro 5\Papers

In this folder are paper texture files with the file extension .TEX. Open the files in Paint Shop Pro 5 and save them as .PSD files. You can then apply these textures on Photoshop images in the same manner as the ones supplied with Photoshop.

The following background tiles were all made very rapidly in Photoshop by applying the texture filter using the "Load Texture" option. The textures were made from .PSD files using the Paint Shop Pro 5 .TEX files located in the "Papers" folder.

Background Tiles For Web Pages

Previous   Home    Contact Mike   Related Sites    Next