So, I have this wood background and I’d like to make it white/gray in photoshop. I created a layer, made it white, put it on top of the wood layer, and then changed the opacity. however, it didn’t quite do what I wanted.
I’m trying to create something like this
However, I’d like stronger whites and greys here.
How would I do this??
One option would be to convert it to grayscale and then lighten it by adjusting the levels. Here’s a quick example:
Yea. I did your the image > adjustments > black and white then adjusted some.
However, I’m looking for a bigger contrast. Like a very strong white and a grey. If you go here you will see what I did. I’m just not 100% happy with it yet. I definitely need to take some more photoshop tutorials.
Look in the footer
Hm, yes, I could do with more lessons too. Make sure to optimize your images, though. Your body background is 5.7mb, which is about 20 times too large. Took ages to download for me.
Yes. I’m still trying to figure out how to optimize. I actually posted about it the other day.
It’s easy in Photoshop. Just go to File > Save for Web. There are various settings you play with there, like choosing a quality level (for jpgs).
if you have regular color wood, you can change color mode to convert to gray… another nice bonus of this technique is that it will reduce the filesize by roughly 1/3 to start with ( so even if your original image is gray, make sure it’s in grayscale mode). Note, this is kinda moot if you save as PGN8 or GIF… but for something as textural as wood, I wouldnt go that route anyway.
You can lighten /darken and ad contrast with the level slider… but I tend to favour curves. It offers far more control.
consider your bg dimensions… 2600px@72px/in is awefully big, and is useless for mobile devices. How about:
1300px ( or so @ 36px/in?) and compressed at 40% jpg ( a lil blur might not hurt either since this is merely a page bg)
There are many options in Photoshop regarding colors. You can select any color you want in your image. It provides options to set the brightness. I think you should select grey color and try to adjust the brightness, may be then you would be able to get the image you preferred.
Your example stock photo is computer generated wood texture, a plugin for Photoshop. Thats why it looks perfect :) I believe its “Alien Skin eye candy Nature” - wood texture.
But if you want real wood, in order to have a small size file, you then must crop a portion of the texture and optimize it so it can repeat seamlessly and create a background. Check the attached, created from your image.
applying different color mode with in a layer can perform good