Photoshop Tips and Tricks Exercises
by Tracy Marks      
Photoshop Tips and Tricks (Gary Young, ZDU)
WEEK ONE: Creating Original Textures



EXERCISES for WEEK ONE:
Rainbow, Brushed Metal, Color Swirl
Badw_ad and Gradient/Texture Mask version
Creating original textures (this page)



I have little experience with filters, so this exercise was completely trial and error. All I knew was
that I wanted to use sea colors, and have a textured and perhaps wavy effect. I experimented with
some of the techniques in lesson one, and made three versions of the same image.




     Sea Texture, 14 kb
     I started with blue-green 0,153,153, and used the
     filter texturize, texturizer, sandstone with top right
     lighting, 150% scaling, and 25% relief. I tried
     creating a gradient mask, with a subtle transition
     from light to dark, using 0,153,102 in the middle,
     and 0,153,102 for a darker blue green end color.

  





    Sea Texture Star Whirl, 26 kb
    I then applied filter, distort, wave with two
    generators. The result was 1/4 of the above
    texture. Curious how it would tile, I defined
    it as a pattern, and tried edit, fill, pattern in
    a new file. The result was a 4-piece mosaic,
    but the interior design was imbalanced. So
    I selected and rotated two of the quarter
    pieces, and saved the new 4-piece texture.







    Sea Texture Swirl, 15kb
    I then applied distort, twirl. I wanted the
    twirl to be subtle, but because because
    it too easily fragmented, I settled for one
    large swirl. Some texture may have been
    lost as a result of swirling. But since I
    converted to index color before saving
    to rgb, I may have flattened the image....
    and perhaps reconverting to jpg could not
    restore what was lost. And unfortunately,
    spotty areas appear on my browser which
    do not appear in Photoshop. Why?





Go back to: Week one: Raindrop etc.
 Go forward to: Next exercises



Tracy Marks, Internet Trainer, Arlington, Massachusetts
Windweaver Web Resources          Windweaver Web Design Resources
Photoshop Bookmarks online        Psychology Bookmarks online
Internet Training Class Notes       WebWinds Web Cameras
Tracy's Lair       Tracy's Nature Photography    Torrey's Thalassa
    Princess Diana Tribute     Viktor Frankl Tribute

1