[Rabid Penguin]

Hey everyone. I want to know how to do a distressed, weathered sort of effect exactly like in the following picture.



I have had no luck at all finding a tutorial, so i'm hoping that somoone on here knows how to do it.

Thanks.

[matthew]

To me that looks like a composite image, where someone has used a photograph of a texture to overlay the main image. I've never tried it myself, but don't imagine it would be that difficult to do -- but it's probably very difficult to do well. You have me curious, so I may have to try it.

[Irma]

Here you have the link of one of the many sites that you might find

http://tutorialblog.org/grunge-photoshop-tutorials/

Google grunge effect or grunge brushes.

Almost always in the tutorial they give you the brushes, if you don't get them you can ask I can give you the ones I have.

This effect is a layed work with brushes and textures ...

[Keith Alan]

That's the Statue Of Liberty behind and to the right of the pigeon, so this must be a composite.

With a high-contrast silhouette for the subject like this, I imagine it isn't too difficult to do.
The texture doesn't necessarily have to be behind, it could be a layer over the top that's been made semi-transparent in the blending mode.

Making your own textures simply involves shooting all the walls and such that interest you, then turning them into texture files in Photoshop.

[matthew]

The nice thing about photoshop is that there's lots of different ways to do everything.

I wanted to try the composite approach out, so I crumpled some plain paper and took a couple of photos. (Nine pages each crumpled differently, 60 photos in different lighting...) I found a photo from last night was taken under pretty grim conditions, so adding texture couldn't hurt. It turns out that it's very hard to get the look right. This is as far as I got with it:



I may experiment more with different textures, but now I'm off to find a tutorial on how to do it properly.

[Irma]

Did you find the tutorial Matt??

Here is my try...
Ok, you all know the picture already but I thought it would fit the mood...



I like a lot to work with this effect so I'll work on more...

[Rabid Penguin]

Thanks heaps, Irma, you gave me Exactly what I was looking for! Cheers!

I had a go at grunging up this picture I took at Mt. Rainier National Park, which I thought was suitable for the effect.

What do you think?

[Irma]

You are welcome RB...

I like it!!
I think you did it quite well...

Could yout tell what you did in your post processing?
Did you use textures, brushes?

Here is the site where I got my brushes to make the music paper the other day. They have very nice ones and they are for free...

[Rabid Penguin]

ooh, looks like i might have to do a tutorial of my own!

[Irma]

You are right...

but... what about something like this??

[Rabid Penguin]

What I did, was created a new layer, filled it with black then used a grunge brush (crumpled paper effect) in white, then set the blending mode to screen and opacity to 55%. (the brush i used was horizontal so i had to rotate the canvas). Then I merged the layers and used a couple more smaller grunge brushes for the white flecks.

[Irma]

I haven't done it like this... I have to try with a black layer for the brush. Thanks for the hint...

I would love to be able to rotate better the brush and not the canvas. It would work much better I think.

Too much has to do the picture of course, as Keith said, but I have seen very common pictures with this effect that look very nice... Some HDR that turned out noisy look well when you treat them like this.

BTW, it was great that you came with this effect. I like it a lot...

[matthew]

Did you find the tutorial Matt??

I had a look for tutorials on the composite angle, but I couldn't find any dealing with textures. So, trial and error it is. Here are some more attempts, none of which really came close to the initial sample photo.

Tree with wood grain:



Pedestrians with paper texture:



Taxi with crumpled paper:

[Rabid Penguin]

Hmm.. Try concrete, matt?

[matthew]

I got a couple of photos of concrete, but nothing I like. I need pavement with more character than the sidewalks around here. I have some other texture photos that I may try to work with as well: books, fabrics, plaster, and tile. The results of about fifteen minutes wandering the house with a macro lens and a flash.

I'm excited about getting a TTL flash cable (lazy) and some radio remotes (also lazy) next week to try to improve my lighting with the texture photos. I'm finding that the more subtle patterns just don't work as well. But I'm still a long way from creating anything significant.

[smarti77]

Great to see some creative juices flowing. Its interesting to see the different approaches taken and the results.
Your edit on your at Mt. Rainier National Park image looks great.

I tried the crumpled paper layering...

[Irma]

Matt,
I find more notorious the effect in #1 and #3 and I like them.
To me was also very difficult to have a tutorial where they explain well how to get a nice effect... many people say they learned by doing... kind of trial and error...

Smarti,
That picture is really great!! Excellent HDR treatment plus the textures... I like it a lot!!
Your colors are beautiful...
Any special treatment in the colors?....

[smarti77]

Thanks Irma - The colour of the truck come out really well straight from photomatix. I also used an 'urban acid' action to alter the colours just slightly. And finally used photoshop to simply reduce the saturation quite a bit (to give it that old image look to match the textures).

[Kombisaurus]

Great effects here people.
I particularly like RP's Mt. Rainier National Park, and Matt's Taxi with Crumpled Paper shots. But all of them are good.
Smarti, the crumpled paper really suits the dents in the truck. It looks like the texture becomes one with the subject.

[matthew]

Smarti, RP, those are both excellent photos. The textures and treatments of both of them are each perfectly suited to the main image.

I'm certainly learning a lot from this thread. Now I just need to find a way to put some of the ideas into practice.

[Toad]

Truck shot is excellent!!