#eh: tutorial

STEP ONE.

Upload your gifs into a text post. How many you can upload at once will depend on the quality of your internet connection. I prefer to upload in batches of 10-ish as I make them because my network adapter is busted, but with a decent connection you can easily upload 50+ in one post. There’ll be three little dots in the top right of the post as the gifs load up. It can take a while when there’s a lot of gifs, just give it a minute. 

STEP TWO.

Once the dots disappear, save the post as a draft. It might seem like you can skip saving the post and just jump into step three, but saving it is essential. If you don’t, the gifs will disappear from your gif page within a day or two. Save the post as a draft.

STEP THREE.

Click the edit symbol on the draft. Then click the cogwheel in the top right. At the bottom of the pop-up is the Text Editor drop-down menu. Select ‘Markdown’, and then immediately go back and select ‘HTML.’ 

Going to Markdown first strips away the <figure> HTML, which is what forces all the gifs onto separate lines. You’ll be left with just the <img> HTML, like so:

STEP FOUR.

Copy the HTML, and open up your gif page. If you just want them to show on your usual blog theme, click ‘HTML’ and paste the gifs there. If you want to use a custom page theme, click the Layout drop-down menu at the top and select ‘Custom Layout’, paste the theme you want to use into it, and then paste the gifs into the space the code tells you to. Repeat as necessary until your entire gif pack is uploaded to the page.

Remember to give the page its own URL, and hit save. That’s all there is to it. You can delete the drafted post afterwards. No third-party websites needed for image-hosting or tag-stripping.

QUICK RECAP.

Upload gifs in a text post.

Save post as draft.

Edit draft > Cogwheel.

Text Editor: Markdown.

Text Editor: HTML.

Copy and paste into page.

Sleep easy knowing your gifs are safe.

Index.

Ethically Sourcing Your Images.

Finding The Right Image.

Making Your Texture.

Other Tricks I Use.

Quick Recap.

Making Textures Without Images: Speedrun.

Outro.

Ethically Sourcing Your Images. 

I will be explaining a couple quick ways to make textures without any images at the end of the tutorial, but since my personal favourite way involves images and that’s specifically what the anon requested, that’s what the majority of the tutorial will be focused on.

The first step, naturally, is finding an image to use. My personal favourite site is Unsplash, but there are plenty of options out there. 

What you need to keep in mind is what kind of license the images have. Unsplash is free for personal and commercial use with no attribution required, which makes it perfect for things like this. There are more sites like this in my free for commercial use masterlist (linked at the end of the post), but unless you’re using them in products you’re selling (like graphic commissions), the commercial aspect isn’t something you need to worry about. Just check the site/photographer’s rules to make sure you’re allowed to edit the images for personal use, and whether attribution (credit) is required. 

Another important thing to keep in mind is that these sites typically never allow you to redistribute the images as they are. That means you can’t just go to Unsplash’s texture category, save the images without any changes, and reupload them in a texture pack on Tumblr. That’s stealing. We don’t do that.

Finding The Right Image.  

Knowing what kinds of images will make good textures is a learning curve. My first couple texture packs are rough compared to what I make now, because I basically taught myself with no guidance and learned through trial and error. But with practice, I learned what worked and what didn’t. 

You want your images to be HQ, either with no ‘subject’ (ie. a person) or with a large background. Higher contrast is better but not super necessary. You should hopefully be able to envision what kind of texture you want to make before you even touch the image.

Making Your Texture. 

For the majority of the tutorial, this is the image I’ll be working with. Credits can be found in the link at the end of the post. 

Open your canvas. You can make specialised textures, like 100px for icons or 540px for Tumblr graphics, but I personally prefer to make them large for versatility. I’m using 800px in this tutorial. Once you’ve chosen your size, upload your full-size image into the canvas. This is where the fun begins!

Drag the image around into a nice position. Or use Edit > Transform to rotate, flip, and warp the image in different ways. Or use Edit > Free Transform (Ctrl+T) to change the size or the angle more precisely. Or probably some combination of all three! With Free Transform, make sure this aspect ratio anchor is selected so you don’t butcher the quality of the image, unless you’re warping it intentionally:

This is all very individual to each image you use. You might want to flip one, shrink another, put another at a 30 degree angle. Just experiment until you end up with something you think would look awesome as a texture. For the sake of providing a good example, I flipped this image vertically, shrunk it to 80% its original size, and rotated it until it looked like the smoke/cloud was coming from the bottom right corner. This is what we have:

Then we move onto enhancing. Textures work best when there’s a lot of contrast because it’s easier to manipulate the blending modes. So if your image isn’t already high contrast, these adjustment layers (Brightness/Contrast, Levels, and Selective Colour) are your new best friends:

If you don’t see this on your Photoshop, go to Window > Adjustments and it should pop up. Again, just experiment, because different images will require different things. Essentially, you want to make the darks darker and the lights lighter. Something I like to do is add a Selective Colour layer and use the Black slider. Pick out the primary colour of the image, and then Whites, in the drop-down menu, and move the bottom slider (left to lighten, right to darken) until you’re satisfied. Like so:

So with those Selective Colour settings and the following Levels settings, here’s the before and after of my image.

Much better contrast! If you want to end here, you can, but I personally prefer grayscale textures a lot of the time because it makes it more versatile. Instead of being forced to make a blue graphic because this image is blue, I can make any colour graphic I want with one simple black and white Gradient layer. Photoshop does have a default Black & White adjustment feature, but I prefer using Gradients.

Pro tip: if your image doesn’t have a pure black, you can keep the darkest parts of your image dark by using the left slider, shown below. 

A lot of the time, I’ll also decrease the opacity of that Gradient layer, to somewhere between 80% and 95%, so just a hint of the original colour comes through. This gives it more dimension in my opinion, while still keeping it mostly neutral. Here’s 100% vs. 85%:

You may find that you want to add a little more contrast after. With this texture, I decided to grab another Selective Colour layer, pick ‘Black’ in the drop-down menu, and pull the Black slider up to +40. I also settled on 95% opacity for the Gradient. And here’s the final product!

Other Tricks I Use. 

That covers how I make a lot of my easier textures, but here’s a quick run-through of other, slightly more complex tricks. I’ll be working with this image (again, credit at the end of the post):

This, of course, is not as obviously texture-worthy as the previous example, but I love textures with strong lines, so here’s how the magic happens! I wanted to get rid of the detail on the bottom half, so I used the Polygonal Lasso tool to select it:

Then I used the eyedropper tool (the 4th symbol under the polygonal lasso in the image above) to select the blue of the sky and, on a new layer, painted that selection completely blue. I decreased the opacity to 90% just so it wasn’t a total block colour, but not enough that you can really see the lines. I repeated this process for the sky, so it looked more consistent with the bottom half.

Then, using the eyedropper tool again and making a new layer for every colour, I went in with a small soft paintbrush and painted out the harsh vertical lines on each segment of the stripes. I didn’t want to make them totally perfect, but I painted over the bulkiest interruptions. 

I added a black and white Gradient layer, using the slider tool I showed you before to darken the darks and lighten the lights, and decreased it to 50% so that it wasn’t totally black and white but still more neutral than the original. Here’s the result:

Another fun way to shake things up, which unfortunately will require Photoshop (CS6 should be fine, not sure about earlier versions), is the Filter Gallery. Go to Filter > Filter Gallery, and you’ll find a TON of effects that change your image drastically. Most of the default settings are nightmarish, but you can play around with the settings panel on the right.

Here’s just a few results that are possible with the Filter Gallery, labelled for convenience. You can view the HQ versions in the link at the end of the post.

Quick Recap. 

So you don’t have to reread this obnoxiously large tutorial every time you want to reference it in the future:

Choose a HQ image.

Resize, rotate, flip, and/or warp.

Enhance the contrast.

Black and white!

Paint over problem areas!

Filter > Filter Gallery.

Making Textures Without Images: Speedrun.

We’re almost done! There are some tools built directly into Photoshop that can allow you to make textures completely from scratch, and I’ll briefly cover my favourites here. 

The first is pattern fill layers. I spent too many years not appreciating the patterns feature in Photoshop, but they’re great. Go to Layer > New Fill Layer > Pattern, click ‘OK’ on the box that pops up, and another box will pop up to let you choose your pattern. 

By themselves, they are UGLY. It can take a while to figure out how to use them. But if you change the scale, change the blending mode, and change the opacity, you have thousands of textures at your fingertips. And if you add two or three together? Billions of possibilities. I can do a more in-depth tutorial on patterns if y’all are interested, but here’s two examples I just whipped up in a matter of minutes, using two patterns on each:

The next feature is gradient fill layers, and the gradient tool. Go to Layer > New Fill Layer > Gradient… to select a gradient (or make your own!) and an angle, OR use the gradient tool (featured below) to drag the gradient across your canvas manually. On its own, boom, that’s a gradient texture. Paired with a pattern or put through the Filter Gallery? Even better!

The last is brushes. Brushes can be great for textures because there are so many kinds. You want to make a paint splatter texture? Paint splatter brush sets are everywhere! You want to make a smoky texture? You can get brushes that look like smoke! Smudged? Scratchy? Grunge? Halftone? Light leaks? Torn paper? Brushes have your back. 

With all of these features (and things like actions, too!), your saving grace is going to be this little cog wheel shown below, and the list you’ll find under the Reset/Save/Load section. There are SO many more options built directly into Photoshop that you don’t even see right away, because you have to add them manually from this little cog wheel. 

And you can download countless more patterns, gradients, and brushes from sites like Brusheezy and DeviantART. A couple tutorials on downloading and installing them can be found in the link at the end of the post, but remember, download these things ethically. If you want to sell products that use a custom brush, it’s your responsibility to find brushes that are free for commercial use. If you don’t want to credit the creator, it’s your responsibility to find resources that don’t require attribution. 

Outro.

I think that’s everything, guys! If you found this tutorial helpful or otherwise enjoy my content, please consider supporting me on Ko-fi! I offer exclusive rewards, like custom graphics, to everyone who donates. 

Due to Tumblr’s latest rules about links, you can find the credits list, the promised bonus tutorials, other important links, and the full-size HQ versions of the textures made in this tutorial over here.

Step 1: Make your gif as you normally would, and make sure that your PSD is in its own group. This is essential for later!

Step 2: Use the rectangle tool shown below, or any shape tool you want, to draw a shape onto your gif where you want it to go. It likely won’t be the same length as your gif by default, so just drag the end in Video Timeline to make it match.

Default:

Fixed:

Step 3: With your new shape layer selected, go to Layer > Layer Style and add whatever effects you want. For before/after gifs, I always use a white stroke and a drop shadow. These are my typical settings:

Step 4: In your Layers panel, drop the Fill of your shape layer down to 0%. This’ll make the shape invisible while leaving the layer styles intact.

Step 5: Right-click on the layer title and click ‘Rasterize layer’ (or go to Layer > Rasterize... > Shape, whichever is easier for you to remember). This makes the next step possible.

Step 6: Right-click on the layer preview image and click ‘Select Pixels’. This is especially useful for more complicated shapes, but in general is one of my favourite Photoshop features. It’ll make a selection identical to the shape.

Step 7: Go to Select > Inverse to invert the selection. It should look like this:

Step 8: Then click your PSD group in the layers panel and click the ‘Add layer mask’ symbol, as indicated below. This essentially means the PSD will now show outside of the shape but not within it.

And that’s it! Your layers panel and your gif should look like this:

Quick Recap:

Make gif as usual.

Group all PSD layers together.

Make desired shape.

Remember to match the shape to the length of the gif.

Add desired layer styles.

Shape Fill: 0%.

Rasterize shape.

Select pixels.

Invert selection.

Add layer mask to PSD group.

Done!