Photoshop Texture Exercises: Creating Textures from Photographs

This is the texture I created in todays Photoshop workshop. I attempted to create a backlit sign, like the menus found in restaurants and poster signs outside of the cinema.

The texture was created simply by creating basic shapes, manipulating them and applying photographs as overlays to make it appear more lifelike.

I started with a basic grey rectangle, then applied some smaller, light rectangles in the centre to emulate lightbulbs. I then applied an outer glow to these shapes, and a gaussian blur to soften the shape. A plain white overlay was applied on top of this, acting as the plastic/frosted glass, and the metal frame was constructed by using an inner stroke on the base rectangle, then adding bevels, inner and drop shadows to give it a little shape. Finally, the texture overlay was applied and the layer set to multiply to give it a worn appearance.

I aim to add some text to the texture when I can, just to make its purpose clear (it kind of looks like a grill thing at the moment)

The Texturing Construction Process

The Texture So Far

Testing the Texture as a Series