Quick Photoshop Wood/Tree Bark Texture

SUPER quick tutorial, just to show a technique that can be used in many different degrees to get awesome results. Photoshop CS5 has a great filter called “Fibers”; a render filter similar to “Clouds” – another popular filter in generating textures and backgrounds. So without any more delay, check out how easy it is to start making wood textures with Photoshop.

[Step 1]
Start a new document, pretty much any settings will work. This one is a generic 1600×1200 web template.

[Step 2]
Choose a foreground color that’s a medium brown. Like all the settings in this tutorial, you’re free to experiment as much as you want with the color. You can see in the screenshot this color is #703d0a. Also,make sure to set your background color to black at this point.

[Step 3]
Fill the background with your background color (black). You could have done this when you created the document, but in case anyone doesn’t know the shortcut: Command + delete (on a Mac) will fill the current layer with the background color. While were here – Option + delete will fill the layer with the foreground color.

[Step 4]
Next we go into the Filter Menu to find the ‘Render’ sub-menu and then the ‘Fibers…’ filter.

[Step 5]
Once more, use whatever settings you want (and I encourage you to play with them to learn how they work). Here I’ve used Variance: 20 and Strength: 3. Make sure to zoom to an appropriate zoom level for the preview, and press the ‘Randomize’ button at the bottom until you get a texture you like.

[Step 6]
Now, it looks like we could be done at this point and be pretty happy with the results. And that’s the beauty of this technique: from this point forward, you can tweak, modify, and manipulate this tutorial using the same basic steps to get a number of different results. For my next step, I’m going to make a new layer.

[Step 7]
Choose white as your background color (or whatever color you want).

[Step 8]
Command + delete to fill the new layer with white.

[Step 9]
Basically – repeat steps 4 and 5…Apply another ‘Fibers…’ filter. I used the same settings, and just pressed randomize a couple of times. Like I mentioned before, this is where you can really go crazy and try all sorts of things: different colors, different settings in the ‘Fibers…’ dialogue, more than two layers, etc.

[Step 10]
One final (totally customizable) step. Change the blending mode (found in the Layers palette; should be in the bottom right hand corner of your window) to something other than ‘Normal.’ I like the way ‘Soft Light’ looks, though many of them offer unique results that you may prefer. Try some of the different modes out, and with other options like more layers and colors, too!

Final image:
Download PSD

Cool, huh?