Realistic Wood Texture

1. Create a new document (640*480). In this tutorial we are trying to create a somewhat realistic wood texture that can be used for almost anything! It's not really photo-realistic but it does the job and it requires little to no time to create this.

2. Start out by using your paint bucket tool to fill the background with #ad7b33 (brown).

3. Now go to (filter - noise - add noise) and use the following settings shown in the image below this third step.

4. Now we're going to blur out this noise so navigate to (filter - blur - motion blur) and use the exact settings as I used in this example to achieve the wooden texture you're trying to create!

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5. Now duplicate this layer (layer - duplicate layer) and desaturate the image (image - adjustments - desaturate). after that, change the blending mode of this particular layer to soft light and also lower the opacity to about 40% like I did…

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6. While you still have the duplicated layer selected go to (filter - artistic - poster edges) and use the settings as shown in the image below. It already looks fantastic and you can certainly see that this is supposed to bee wood. But wood has some irregularities and in the next step we'll try to add these and keep the wooden texture as realistic as possible!

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7. Go to (filter - liquify) and play around with the tools you can use there to add some swirls and other things! I've included a screenshot from the things I've done to my wooden texture using the liquify tool and the second screenshot is my final result! So there you go, you've just created a realistic wood texture that can be used for almost anything! You can even use it to design a tree if you want to…

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Click to enlarge