If, like me, you like the patina of aged, rusty metal, then this Photoshop trick is for you.
Start with a gray background and add layers of age in succession — mottling, corrosion, scarring, flaking, chipping — until you have just the distressed look you desire.
You’ll employ a variety of techniques, too: layers, blend modes, Gaussian blurs, saturation controls, the burn tool, and so on.
In this excerpt from “Design Graphics Photoshop Studio Skills,” you’ll see for yourself that (in the words of Neil Young) rust never sleeps.
We’ve posted this excerpt as a PDF file. All you do is click the link “Aging Metal Textures” to open the PDF file in your Web browser. You can also download the PDF to your machine for later viewing.
Excerpted from “Design Graphics Photoshop Studio Skills” by Colin Wood. Copyright © 2003 Wiley Publishing. All rights reserved. Reproduced here by permission of the publisher.
This article was last modified on July 18, 2023
This article was first published on November 24, 2004
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I didn’t learn anything I already didn’t know. Felt it was a little to involved to get the look that was achieved.
I agree with the other comments — source pics would be nice. Also, the final images have the rivets overlapping the ‘underlying aluminium layer’ which they shouldn’t do — need to paint the rivets back in. Use of advanced layer blending to partially reveal underlayers would be nice too.
While the article is interesting, I suspect the majority of us do not have such a selection of images at our fingertips. I was hoping for a tuturial was worked on creating these effects from just the greyscale image.
Most of your how-to’s are quite good, but this one requires a whole bunch of image files that are not even supplied. How can you even try out the step by steps without the files. Give us a technique that starts from scratch.