This tutorial will show you how to make realistic wood and will work from photoshop 7 to CS3. It will also show us how to use actions and some of the uses that the fibre, filter has.
Let us begin.
Begin by opening a document that is 500px square. then go to Window>Actions.
This will open a new dialogue box and in it will be Default Actions. You don't want these, so you'll have to click on the symbol indicated by the red arrow (please not on cs2 and below, this icon will be a small circle with an arrow inside it.
When you click this a drop down box will appear. Near the bottom of this box is Textures, select this and it should load up a textures box under default actions. Click the small arrow next to the word Textures to open up the options and find Rosewood 2, select this and near the bottom, click the play button, as is shown here.
The process is now automatic, the only thing you have to do is click OK in the shear dialogue box when it prompts you to do so. When done, you will have this.
Now this is good, but by no means perfect, so we shall ad some modifications to our own. Duplicate the layer (ctrl/cmd + J) and go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and set it to about 1.0, like so.
What this does is take the slight pixelation that the action creates away. Next step is to press Ctrl+ D to reset your colour swatch and go to Filter > Render > Fibres and just use the default settings.
Next, press ctrl/cmd + t to transform the layer, right click inside the bounding box and click rotate it 90 degrees clockwise or counter clock wise, doesn't really matter. Now, set this fibre's layer to soft light and you're pretty much done. It should look something like this.
Looks pretty effective and by pressing Ctrl/Cmd + E to merge it all and then by duplicating the layer again and using other layer effects, you can get darker or lighter woods. It looks particularly effective when some lighting effects are applied, like so.
Hope you enjoyed this tutorial.
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