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Woodgrain in Photoshop or...

rjssigns

Active Member
I have a wrap idea that utilizes teak/mahogany textures. I've been trying to create woodgrain in Photoshop and haven't had much success. Reason I want to build a texture is to control grain pattern and color.

Anyone here a Photoshop expert that can share tips? Or am I better off buying a high res photo then enlarging?
 

KY_Graphics_Gal

New Member
Since you are creating a large format print I would recommend a vector wood grain file. There are plenty of very realistic ones on FreePik.com
 

signman315

Signmaker
Either a stock vector or really high res raster...I like istockphoto.com or shutterstock. I did a couple wraps to make modern vehicles look like the old woodies. My technique was to find a really high resolution wood grain from Istockphoto, make it tileable (can be done with any image, lots of tutorials out there), then once I had that I would use layers for hue/saturation, color balance, and levels adjustments. I would then create a swatch from that in Illustrator. The end result was a non destructive fully controllable wood grain that I could use as a fill on any vector shape. If you set up the tileable image with care then it won't have any redundant, repeating pattern. And if you aren't happy with it looking repeated from the tiling then you can go back to photoshop and instead of making a tileable image, manually tile it, and any areas that are redundant just use the clone stamp tool to sample another part of the wood grain and paint out the repetitive areas. If you aren't proficient and photoshop and illustrator there will be a few learning curves, but once you know your tools/software this process happens in a matter of minutes. Hope it helps :)
 

shoresigns

New Member
Designing wood textures is massive PITA, no matter what source material you have to work with. Here are some of the issues:

  1. You have to figure out the right scale to print them at in order to look realistic.
  2. Making your own tileable seamless wood grain textures is hard, because it takes a lot of messing around to get the grains to line up on the seams without breaking them somewhere else.
  3. You have to remove all knots and variations in colour if you want the tiling to look believable, but it's the knots and the variations in colour that make wood look real in the first place.
  4. Even if you get everything else right, it's still a digital print and it's going to look fake unless you have the ability add more texture with a spot clearcoat, similar to 3M Di-NOC material.
TLDR; save yourself the pain and use 3M Di-NOC.
 

rjssigns

Active Member
Hi guys,

Lots of great responses. Thanks for the links Fred.
I hadn't thought about vector woodgrain. Will explore that at a later date.

Shoresigns is right about it being a PITA creating from scratch. Chewed up a few hours trying to build a file in Photoshop. Looks okay, but not crisp enough for yacht work. Di-Noc would be great if it could be installed on compound contours. Gloss woodgrain Di-Noc is only suitable for interior applications too.

Going to give Signman315's advice a try. Found a great photo that's already 26.5" wide. Just need to "upres" about 500% to get the width I need.
 

GAC05

Quit buggin' me
Corel Draw 7 or 8 shipped with a program that generated digital textures. The wood was pretty good with lots of control & could be rendered out to almost any sized bitmap. Corel Texture. I thought I still had a copy loaded but can't find it now.
 

Southpaw1

New Member
Corel Draw 7 or 8 shipped with a program that generated digital textures. The wood was pretty good with lots of control & could be rendered out to almost any sized bitmap. Corel Texture. I thought I still had a copy loaded but can't find it now.
I have both versions of Corel but havent loaded the texture side ( i started w 9). What OS will they run on?
 

Southpaw1

New Member
Im actually running an old roland plotter as back up that stopped updates with xp so i still have that desktop up n going
 

Southpaw1

New Member
I dont have the seperate program only those versions of Corel. If anyone happens upon it i'd love to grab a copy of it!
 

Boudica

Back to "educational purposes"
That's an awesome site, Thanks! Anymore like that?
Vecteezy is a good one too. It will show you some cooler stuff (for$) from shutterstock, but if you keep scrolling they have lots of free vectors. I grab stuff from there all the time.
 
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