406 Matching a real-world paper texture

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques! Now, as you may recall, we're working on that famous million dollar stamp, but really, all we've done so far is to create the upside-down plane and the red frame. What we need to do now is to match the natural paper texture of that stamp, and while this may not look all that exciting, it is critical for conveying the authenticity of our design, and it's a combination of a few digital effects along with some actual paper fibers. Here, let me show you exactly how it works.

All right, here's the final version of our postage forgery, but our paper texture is sufficiently subtle that it's difficult to make out even on screen. Which is why I've included this layered composition that shows off the paper by itself. And it includes some fabricated digital bumps, as well as these natural paper fibers. Now, I will say that I started off trying to create a repeating pattern. The problem is, the original stamp scan doesn't have that much real estate that isn't covered up, either by the plane or the frame, and it's really just this region here.

That's the largest area we have to work with. And so I started with that tiny square, and I made a few modifications, just to ensure that there weren't any obvious seams, but the best that I came up with was this pattern right here. And even if you don't look at it all that closely, it's obviously a repeating geometric form. Which is why I came up with an alternate approach. So here I have an image that represents all of our progress so far, so we have all the plane and frame layers, I've got the background selected, and the first thing that I'm gonna do is create a layer of gray by going up to the Layer menu, choosing New Fill Layer, and then I'll choose Solid Color.

And I'm gonna go ahead and call this layer "texture," let's say, because it is gonna serve as our texture layer, and then I'll go ahead and click OK, and once I see the color picker dialogue box, I'll make sure that both the hue and saturation values are set to zero, and I'll raise the brightness value to 50% and I'll click OK. Now at this point, I need to apply a few filters, I can't apply filters to a solid color layer inside Photoshop, so the first thing I have to do is right click in the image window with my rectangular marquee tool, and then I'll choose Convert to Smart Object.

And now, I can apply as many smart filters as I like. I'm gonna start off by going to the Filter menu, choosing Noise, and choosing Add Noise. And these are the settings I'm looking for, an amount of 25%, distribution set to Gaussian, and the monochromatic check box should be on so we don't introduce any weird colors. At which point, go ahead and click OK. Now, we're not gonna be using this filter mask, and it's taking up room in the layers panel. So I'm gonna right click inside that white thumbnail and choose Delete Filter Mask to get rid of it.

Now I wanna blur the noise, so that we don't have these neighboring individual pixels, and I'll do that by going up to the Filter menu, choosing Blur, and choosing Gaussian Blur, and the value I came up with was two pixels, like so. All right, now click OK. Now we need to convert this noise into a texture, by going to the Filter menu a third time, choosing Stylize, and choosing Emboss. And the settings you apply are really up to you at this point, but I went with an angle of 135 degrees, an amount value of 100%, and a height value of two pixels.

So if you're following along, you probably wanna do the same thing, because the amount value, in particular, affects the next step. So now I'll go ahead and click OK to accept that bump texture. All right, now, believe it or not, we need to radically increase the contrast of the bumps. And I'm gonna do that by going up to the Layer menu, choosing New Adjustment Layer, and then choosing the Levels command. And I'm gonna go ahead and name this layer "contrast," and I'm gonna turn on this check box, Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask. It's not absolutely necessary for this technique, but it's a good idea.

Because we really want to affect this layer independently of any of the others. And now, I want to spread this histogram out, notice how narrow it is, here in the Properties panel? And incidentally, to see the full histogram, you may need to increase the width of the panel like so. So what I'm gonna do is click inside that black point value, and press shift up arrow to increase it to 100, and then I'm gonna tab my way over to the white point value, and press shift down arrow to take it down to 155. So I'm adding 100 to the black point value, and I'm subtracting 100 from the white point value, and that gives us a ton of contrast as you're seeing here, at which point you can go ahead and hide that Properties panel.

Now we need to assign color to the texture. This is probably the toughest and most subjective step, because it means what you have to do is alt+click once again on the eye in front of the background, and find an open area of texture, like so, paper texture, that is to say, and then what you wanna do is get your eyedropper, make sure that you can see your Color panel, as well as the HSB sliders, and then you wanna click in a dark section of paper, like right about there, let's say, and you'll see that it's a kind of shade of green, and I just sat there and wrote these values down.

So, I first wrote the HSB values down for the green areas, and then I wrote the HSB values down for these little bits of paper fiber, which are a little more yellow, as you can see, so anything around a hue value of 60 degrees is gonna be yellow, anything around 90, all the way up to 140 or what have you, is going to be green, and then we also have these bright areas here, that are pretty much just full-on yellow or a little bit warmer. So anyway, if you're trying to match a paper texture of your own, just go ahead and dial in a few settings, three settings is good, so something for the darkest colors, something for the brightest colors, and then something for the colors in between.

After which point, go ahead and alt+click or opt+click on the eye in front of the Background layer once again, and now I'm gonna zoom out a little bit, 'cause we don't need to be quite this far in, and I'm gonna colorize this image using a gradient map layer. And you can get to that by going to the Layer menu, choosing New Adjustment Layer, and then choosing Gradient Map, at which point I'm gonna go ahead and name this layer "color," and click OK. You could say that you wanna use the previous layer to create a clipping mask, but in my case, I'm not going to.

Just gonna click OK. And it looks to me like that's bringing up the last gradient I applied, but just so that we can all follow along, I'll go ahead and switch this to Black, White. And in case you don't know how gradient map works, it's mapping a gradient to the natural luminous levels of the image, starting with black over here on the left, and ending with white. In other words, we're mapping a black to white gradient onto a black and white image, so we're not really doing anything to it so far. To modify the settings, go ahead and click in this gradient ramp to bring up the Gradient Editor dialogue box, and then double click on that black swatch right there at the beginning and dial in the HSB values for the darkest color, which in my case turned out to be a hue of 120 degrees, I set the saturation value to just 10%, and I set the brightness to 70% for starters, so that you can see that green is now the darkest color in the background.

But that's way too dark, so I'm gonna raise that value to 85%, so we have just a little bit of green going on there, and now I'll click OK. Next, double click on your white swatch and dial in your bright color. Which in my case is a hue value of 60 degrees, in other words, yellow, a saturation of 10%, in other words, not very much, and a brightness value of 95%, meaning very bright, so we have this dull yellow that you can barely make it out right there. Then click OK.

And now we need to dial in a color in between, so I'm just gonna click down here below the ramp to add a color stop. Double click on it in order to once again bring up the color picker, I'm gonna take the hue value up to 70 degrees, I'll take the saturation value up to 15%, and then I will take the brightness value down to 88%, like so, and I'll click OK. Now, believe it or not, based on my comparisons to the original stamp paper, we're seeing too much darkness. So I just went ahead and took this middle color stop over to the right a little bit to brighten things up, see how we're brightening the image ever so slightly? And I'm gonna take it to 40% like so, and then I'll click OK to accept that change.

All right, now I'll hide the Properties panel, 'cause I no longer need it, and the next step is to introduce a little bit of natural paper fiber. Now, you could sit around and try to draw that if you want to, but your best bet is to photograph your own piece of fibrous paper, or to hunt down a stock image. And I did the latter, I came up with this guy right here from the Fotolia image library, and I'm gonna go ahead and zoom out from it just a little bit, so that we can see the image at 100%. Now, notice that it's pretty much wiping out everything underneath it, and that's because currently, it's set to normal and an opacity of 100%.

I'm gonna change the blend mode to Multiply, so that the fibers are darkening up the background. That's obviously too much, of course. So to isolate the fibers, I double clicked on an empty portion of this layer to bring up the Layer Style dialogue box, and we wanna focus our attention on the This Layer slider. And what I'm gonna do here is, notice if I drag this guy, this black slider triangle to the right, I'm gonna create a lot of harsh transitions, that's not what I want, so I'm gonna alt+drag, or opt+drag these halves of the triangle apart from each other, so that the first half, the left half, starts at zero, and the right half ends at 128, so we have a nice soft transition across the darkest colors.

And now I'm going to move this white slider triangle, again, I get jagged transitions, so I'll alt+drag the right half of it to a value of 255, which is white, and I'll drag the left half across, beyond the black slider, to a value of 50, so we have a very soft drop off there as well, and that leaves pretty much just the fibers behind, as you can see in the background here. Now I'll go ahead and click OK to accept that change, and I'll go ahead and switch back to the rectangular marquee tool, and then I'll tap the "5" key in order to reduce the opacity of these natural fibers to 50% as we can see in the upper right corner of the Layers panel.

All right, now what you wanna do is shift+click on that texture layer so all four of these layers are selected, and then go to the Layers panel flyout menu and choose New Group from Layers. And I'm gonna go ahead and name this group "paper texture," because after all, that's what it is, and now I'll click OK in order to accept that change. And now if you go ahead and zoom out a little bit so that you can take in the entire image, and you turn on these other groups, starting with the frame elements right there, as well as the upside down Curtiss JN-4, better known as the "inverted Jenny," you can see the final version of the postage stamp complete with its subtle but nicely matching paper texture.

And that's how you match the paper texture inherent in a photographic composition using a combination of digital effects as well as one carefully selected stock image here inside Photoshop. Now, if you're a member of the lynda.com online training library, I have a follow-up movie in which I show you how to cast multiple drop shadows behind an object. So as you can see here, we have these warm shadows going down and to the right, and these blue shadows over here on the left. But as you well know, Photoshop only allows you to assign one drop shadow effect to any given layer, so what in the world's going on, and we're going to create these shadows so that they work against any background.

If you're waiting for next week's free movie, I'm gonna show you PC people how to prevent Windows from automatically restarting to run some sort of super important update without your permission! Ah, it makes me so mad! Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.