That Damn . Effect

1. Create a 500x500 new pic, RGB colors etc.

2. fill the image in a darker grey (i used RGB: 50/50/50).

3. make a new channel. Fill it with clouds (Filter -> Render -> Clouds) to give it a more or less random dark/light pattern.

4. Now give that channel a somewhat metallic texture: Filter -> Sketch -> Reticulation. The default settings will do nicely. This is approximately what you'll get:

5. As we don't want the channel to have that much contrast (we don't), go to Image -> Adjust -> Brightness/Contrast and lower the contrast a bit. This channel wil be used to create the base of our metal texture.

6. Create a new, blank layer.

7. Load the selection from the channel we just made by Ctrl-clicking it in the channel tab. This will get the channel contents loaded as a selection. Ignore any eventual warnings about 50% of pixels not being selected.

8. Pick the airbrush (opacity ~50), load a pretty large and diffuse brush (the one with '100' written under it will do nicely), pick the color black and start painting on the new layer with the selection still loaded. You will get something like this:

9. Now go back to the channels tab and make some variations of the first channel (Alpha 1). The more variations you make, the more complex your rust texture will be (but don't go making hundreds of them either). Make each of the new channels different by applying a filter to it (Motion Blur with insane values and any distortion filter should do the trick), by playing with brightness/contrast or just rotating the channel's contents. Make sure that in the end you have several channels with different random-looking patterns -->

10. Repeat steps 6-8, creating a new layer for each channel. You will want to use different colors while painting on each layer, too. If you use only black, the picture will end up too dark, but using insane amount of white won't help either. Stay in the darker/lighter grays tones. Change your airbrush pressure settings. You will want to paint one layer with a brownish/rusty color. to give rust its, um, rusty effect. BTW: You will want to deselect every time you're done painting over a layer. Trust me, when no pixels are more than 50% selected (if you load your selection from a very dark channel), you will forget to do it, and wonder what the hell is going on.

11. Now play with the layers placement (move them up and down in the layer tab) and make more of them if you need.

12. Voila! You now have a pretty good rust texture:

13. If you feel up to it, you may want to touch up each layer with the burn/dodge tool to make the texture more realistic.

Comments go to tenkei, at net@telefragged.com