Some Photoshop & Illy techniques

[Cwilk]

Okay, I made this look like wood in Photoshop before layers existed. It wasn't easy, but now I can let you know how to do it too.

Make a square however large you want your tree type wood to be. A good color would be C40 M65 Y100 K0

Raster that shape.

Use your lasso/rope tool and go slightly around the inside of the square in an irregular manner. Once you've gone around the area select Shift/Apple/i and then delete. This will give you the shape you want.

Now duplicate this layer in Photoshop and make this invisible. Go back to your original layer.

Draw different layers of lines with the paintbrush going in a horizontal direction.

Now select the oval selection tool and make an oval in one area of the wood. In your menu go to Distort and twirl. Take the size of the twirl up to over 700. Repeat this step in a couple of different areas in different sizes.

Now in the menu Filter>Other> select High Pass.

Go to your 2nd layer now (Shape 1 copy) and set the pull down to Multiply. Duplicate this layer and set the new layer to Overlay.

I did a lot of fine tuning on my artwork to get it to where it is. So just play around with the look to get what you want.

PM me if you have any questions....but keep in mind, I did mine in PS 2 or 3. : )

[Cwilk]

The client wanted me to create an illustrator piece of art from a painting on her wall in a bakery. So the art on the right was created in Illy using the reference photo on the left.

I opened the photo in Photoshop and used the vector tool to trace the outside of the bundle of wheat and then I traced most of the individual stalks. It's much easier to see pixels in PS, which is why I did it there rather than Illy.

After I finished the stalks, I exported the paths to Illy. I went through and colored the different groups of stalks in their colors. You'll notice some are brown, some yellow, some gray...etc. I copied and pasted some of the stalks on top of eachother and made them a shade darker or lighter to give them a 3d look. I left the tracing of the entire bundle in the back of my layer order so that any small gaps are filled in by the yellow of the background. This helped to tie up the art and make it a unit.

This really didn't take too long to complete. I would say roughly 3 hours from start to finish.

[d3niss3]

Awesome cwilk!

ah not a designer here but that was just great!

[Mchilly]

I've tried it and got same result thanks for your quick tutorial

[James Random]

I love that piece of work. The rope could be better, i expect - perhaps it might be better to lift the rope directly from the original and just enhance the colours, placing it back down onto your illustrator version.

Great work.

[Cwilk]

I love that piece of work. The rope could be better, i expect - perhaps it might be better to lift the rope directly from the original and just enhance the colours, placing it back down onto your illustrator version.

Great work.

I could have copied and pasted the photo of the rope directly into Illy but then the file wouldn't be vector.

Thanks for the compliments.

[zumojuice]

mmmmmm the other tool that can do raster to vector is the copy tools in illy, mainly from cs2 onwards, but they'd not cope with this kinds of complexity well.

[Cwilk]

The trace tool could have been used to trace a raster to vector, but the trace tool really isn't even a tool that should still be in Illy because it rarely works.

I used Streamline many moons ago, but it wasn't great at converting either.

[mikefortuna]

aside from the rope...its perfect.
gj

[zumojuice]

the CS2 trace tool was much better than the CS1/Streamline option, not at all perfect, but not awful. It had its uses.