Brushed Aluminum Tutorial

Photoshop is a great program for making metallic textures such as brushed Aluminum, rust, and many more.

First start with a blank canvas. I'm using 720x540 for this tutorial. You can do this at any size and the end result should be usable as a pattern as well.

Now make a new layer and select a gray for your foreground color(for this tutorial, I used #919191)

Edit/Fill, and fill with the foreground color.

Use Filter/noise/add noise. I used these settings:



The image should look like this:



use Blur/Motion Blur with these settings:



This is how it should look a this point:



Edit/Transform/Scale and adjust the size of the brushed layer like this:



At this point, you can adjust the Brightness/Contrast to make it more or less coarse, depending on your taste. For this tutorial, I used these settings:



Now, you have a workable brushed aluminum texture.



As mentioned earlier, you can use it as a pattern, or you can do other things with Bevel/Emboss and other blending options it like this:



Hope this helps. Enjoy!

VERY NICE!!

now tht is the pwn

Ok, getting the texture is fairly easy but the picture with the buttons is, well, how did you do the shadows so cool?

P.S.: Maybe a dodge/burn Shadows tutor?

Finally, a tutorial on something I actually already knew how to do.  I swear, with the stuff I've learned from the gracious folks here its kind of nice to feel like I'm not totally inept.

Very good tutorial also by the way, but I think that goes without saying.

TheEx wrote:

Finally, a tutorial on something I actually already knew how to do.  I swear, with the stuff I've learned from the gracious folks here its kind of nice to feel like I'm not totally inept.

This is the reason I do what I do here. Thank you sir, and thanks everyone.

The shadows and other lines I got in that final image were done with bevel/Emboss in blending options. I can embellish on that as well.

Thats tight.

THANKS PYRACI!!!   This isnt a way out of teaching me "splashys" and "water stuff"  heeh