I've had lots of emails asking how I did my wooden background, so I decided to add a new section to the site about photoshop. Not all of these tutorials are 100% relevant to skinng, but I'm sure they will be of some use to some people.

  
Okay, Ive created a new RGB image, 150X150 pixels, and filled it with a brown colour. I then used the Photoshop Craquelure filter, which can be found in Filters/Texture to applay a cracked appearance to it. I suppose it looks a bit like dried mud.

  
Now the clever bit - I've applied a motion blur, set to 50 pixels from left to right. It looks like wood. However, its not overly detailed, so the next thing I did was apply another filter. Use Filter/Texture/Texturizer, and select sandstone. Play with the sliders until you get an effect a bit like the one shown above. I think it was a relief of around 4, and scaling around 100%. It actually looks less like wood now than it did before, but don't worry...

  
...because by blurring again, with a motion blur set on 20 pixels, it looks like wood again. The image is still too clean looking, so I've used the burn tool to darken a few areas.

Now we have a problem. When I select the entire image, define it as a pattern, and fill a larger area with the pattern, it looks nasty - you can see where the tiles meet. There are several ways to get around this by using Kai's filters, but there is an easier way. Thanks to Computer Arts for showing me the light...

  
Firstly, I duplicated my original image, so I won't screw it up. Photoshop has a useful tool called filter/other/offset which offsets a picture. Um. Right. Okay, what I did was shifted the image halfway across and halfway down the canvas. The image is 150X150 pixels, so I offset it by half these values - 75 and 75. I also chose the 'Wrap Around' option in the offset dialog box. You can see the results of this in the left image.

The right image shows the new version. I used the smudge tool to pull pixels across the joins, and you car barely see where the edges used to be. THe next thing I did was use the offset filter again to set the image back to its original location.

Finally, I've defined the new image as a pattern, created a new file, and filled it with the pattern. Its impossible to see the edges, however the dark patch is repeated too much for my liking, so I'd fade it out on the orignal image and tweak it a bit.