
Here you can see – the yellow was showing up on the lighter parts, so in the Black & White options, I told it to make everything yellow as white as possible. So I went to Image – Adjustments – Black & White, and dialed the yellow channel way over, so that there was no color left – it made everything into shades of gray. Everything still had a kind of yellowish cast to it, thanks to the lighting over my kitchen table. I went to Image – Adjustments – Invert first, which swapped my lights and my darks. Then it was time to adjust the settings so I could get the texture I wanted – speckles of black all over a field of pure white.įirst up, I had to invert black to white, and vice versa: I brought the images into Photoshop and cropped them so it was just paper and salt – no table visible. I just took them with my phone’s camera – no need for any fancy special equipment.


I took a few different pictures, re-scattering the salt every time. My assistants gave everything a very thorough sniff, don’t worry. Sadly, our Arizona dirt is reddish-pink, so instead, I opted to scatter some salt on a black sheet of paper.

If the dirt in your yard is black, you could sprinkle it on a white sheet of paper.
#DISTRESSED FX FOR PHOTOSHOP WINDOWS#
Does the pavement outside your house have a cool texture? Are your windows a little bit dirty? Those could make awesome textures! But because I wanted a very specific look, I wanted to photograph something as close to black-on-white or white-on-black as I could get. How do you make a gritty texture? You could start with any photograph. But I wanted to cover everything, and as a bonus, I’m going to give you all of the textures I create today for free! Yes, you can get gritty textures from the internet – there are tons of premium paid textures out there, and quite a few decent freebies as well. Our first step is going to be making our own gritty texture to distress things with. But most of this stuff can be done in other image editing programs (like GIMP), and I’ll talk a little bit at the end about how you can apply some of these techniques to other design programs. You get to choose how much distressing, how big those distressed spots are, and (if you’re creating this in vinyl) how easy or difficult you’re going to make your work.Īnd with these techniques under your belt, you can apply a uniform layer of distressing to all fonts and graphics on your project!Īll of my examples in this guide will be done in Photoshop. So while distressed fonts are awesome, today we’re going to talk about creating your own distressing effects and applying them to solid fonts. If you’re working in vinyl, can you imagine having to pluck out every single little spot here? Another issue is that the font designer has dictated how much distressing there will be, and how large the distressed spots will be. Some people probably don’t mind it, but I’m sure it drives others batty. Follow the colorful arrows and you’ll see – the Ds, Es, and Ss are all repeats. It looks cool, but there are a couple of things that might get on your nerves here: first off, whenever you use a letter, the distressing effect looks exactly the same as every other time you’ve used that letter.

There are plenty of pre-distressed fonts out there to choose from, but sometimes those fonts have issues.įor example, here’s a word typed out in Asfalto (A freebie!). The distressed look is popular these days, and for good reason – it can look totally cool.
