Mini-tutorial: Making your own textures.
It summer vacation. It's early morning, and I had too much coffee for me to go back to sleep. Since I don't have anything else to do, I figured I might as well write a tutorial to keep my brain functioning. I apologize in advance for my terrible use to the English language before fully waking. :-)
I'm using Photoshop Elements to create this tutorial, but I'm fairly certain that it could be easily translated into other programs. All images are fairly large, but there are only three of them, and they have been linked to. It's my first tutorial, so please bear with me.
Making your own textures:
Personally, I try to avoid using brushes and textures made by other people. I believe creating my own textures allows myself to experiment more so than I would if I was given a certain texture. The following is a slight mini-tutorial in which I explain some ways in which I create textures.
The first step involves gathering an image, or even set of images. Using either a digital camera, or even a camera phone, you can easily take pictures of objects which could become great textures. I would avoid using the "older" cameras which require film and development, as that could be time consuming and pricey, but that's just me.As I said earlier, it's all about experimentation.
Another possibility involves searching online via search engines such as google, or yahoo for images. Any image will do, but many images are under copyrights of some sort.
Anyways, I tend to take pictures with my camera phone. As shown here, I have taken a picture of my own hand holding whatever was available: my watch. I like the effect managed by shaking the camera slightly, so I decided to stick with that.
After that, I enlarge the image. How much you enlarge the image depends on whatever you intend to use the texture for. Typically, I save images around 500 px by 500 px, so that I can crop them whenever I need to, but if you plan to use these for wallpapers or layouts, you most likely will need a large image. Keep in mind, if you will only need a small 100 x 100 texture, you can still crop the image, as I will show later.
I had enlarged the image from it's original size of 640 x 480 to 1280 x 960.
For the third step, I decided to add a rather severe motion blur to the image. The direction does not matter, so long as you remain consistent. I choose to keep things horizontal. here is a look at what I currently have (resized at 50% because it was way too big to post).
Next, you can choose what to do next. I suggest reading over the remainder of the tutorial before continuing. (Come now, some reading never killed anyone... ~___^)
If making a light texture, I adjust the contrast at this point. You may choose how much contrast you wish to add. Here is an example. Play around. From there, you can adjust the coloring, and saturation, but I will not go into depth on that subject. Perhaps another day.
If you do not like the idea of a light texture, you can play around on your own, or you can choose to keep the texture as is, and crop it. If you feel creative, you can even create your own brushes using textures, but I have yet to fully grasp that concept myself.
I typically try to save images with larger dimensions, as it lets me adjust them depending on my needs, but it is not necessary.
As I have said numerous times, everything is about your own experimentation. Go wild!
I hope someone out there could benefit from this. Feel free to ask questions, and I will try my best to answer.
Cross-posted to
iconosphere and icon_tutorial.
I'm using Photoshop Elements to create this tutorial, but I'm fairly certain that it could be easily translated into other programs. All images are fairly large, but there are only three of them, and they have been linked to. It's my first tutorial, so please bear with me.
Making your own textures:
Personally, I try to avoid using brushes and textures made by other people. I believe creating my own textures allows myself to experiment more so than I would if I was given a certain texture. The following is a slight mini-tutorial in which I explain some ways in which I create textures.
The first step involves gathering an image, or even set of images. Using either a digital camera, or even a camera phone, you can easily take pictures of objects which could become great textures. I would avoid using the "older" cameras which require film and development, as that could be time consuming and pricey, but that's just me.As I said earlier, it's all about experimentation.
Another possibility involves searching online via search engines such as google, or yahoo for images. Any image will do, but many images are under copyrights of some sort.
Anyways, I tend to take pictures with my camera phone. As shown here, I have taken a picture of my own hand holding whatever was available: my watch. I like the effect managed by shaking the camera slightly, so I decided to stick with that.
After that, I enlarge the image. How much you enlarge the image depends on whatever you intend to use the texture for. Typically, I save images around 500 px by 500 px, so that I can crop them whenever I need to, but if you plan to use these for wallpapers or layouts, you most likely will need a large image. Keep in mind, if you will only need a small 100 x 100 texture, you can still crop the image, as I will show later.
I had enlarged the image from it's original size of 640 x 480 to 1280 x 960.
For the third step, I decided to add a rather severe motion blur to the image. The direction does not matter, so long as you remain consistent. I choose to keep things horizontal. here is a look at what I currently have (resized at 50% because it was way too big to post).
Next, you can choose what to do next. I suggest reading over the remainder of the tutorial before continuing. (Come now, some reading never killed anyone... ~___^)
If making a light texture, I adjust the contrast at this point. You may choose how much contrast you wish to add. Here is an example. Play around. From there, you can adjust the coloring, and saturation, but I will not go into depth on that subject. Perhaps another day.
If you do not like the idea of a light texture, you can play around on your own, or you can choose to keep the texture as is, and crop it. If you feel creative, you can even create your own brushes using textures, but I have yet to fully grasp that concept myself.
I typically try to save images with larger dimensions, as it lets me adjust them depending on my needs, but it is not necessary.
As I have said numerous times, everything is about your own experimentation. Go wild!
I hope someone out there could benefit from this. Feel free to ask questions, and I will try my best to answer.
Cross-posted to
iconosphere and icon_tutorial.