DevTouch.net - Development & Inspiration

Photoshop: Put a Realistic Camouflage Pattern on Textured Cloth

The Camouflage Pattern

This technique can work on virtually any combination of pattern and fabric texture with minor adjusting. In this article, we'll be specifically creating a composition using camouflage and a cotton cloth.

First, we need to work on a large canvas so that we can get ample variations in the camouflage pattern. So start a new document measuring 1500px by 1500px. When we're finished, we'll shrink it down to a smaller size.

Fill the background black.

Then press CTRL+SHIFT+N to create a new layer, and name it "Pattern1."

Your Layers pallet, at this point, should look like the figure shown to the right.

Now we need some random dark and light blotches. Press D to reset your foreground and background colors to black and white respectively. Then, with the Pattern1 layer selected, go to Filter > Render > Clouds.

Next, we need to convert this graded-tone image into a two-tone image that resembles a camouflage pattern. For that, we'll go to Image > Adjustments > Threshold.

What Threshold does is it creates an image consisting only of black and white pixels without any intermediate gray tones, based on the lightness information provided in the source image. Moving the slider to the left reveals lighter areas, and to the right darker ones.

If you want to play around with it, know the white areas represent what will be the light brown areas in our final camouflage pattern. I just left my slider in the middle and hit OK.

Colorize the Pattern

Double-click on the layer's thumbnail to bring up the Layer Style dialog.

Here, we'll set a Color Overlay on top of the pattern, as shown in Step 1 below.

Then set the Blend Mode to Multiply, as shown in Step 2, which tells the Color Overlay to act as a tint, effectively making no change to the areas that are black.

Next, click on the color preview box. This will open a color picker, at the bottom of which is a field where you may type in a hex format color value. Enter FFF5EC and click OKs all the way back to the main window.

Finally, set the opacity of the Pattern1 layer to about 50%:

Add Another Tone to the Camouflage

Duplicate the Pattern1 layer by pressing CTRL+J. This layer will be named "Pattern1 copy" by default. Double-click directly on the text and change it to "Pattern2."

We're now going to use Pattern2 to create an additional level of tone. Go to Edit > Transform > Rotate 180.

With that done, Pattern2 will create regular gray areas where it overlaps only the background, and intensify Pattern1 where the two intersect.

Alternatively, you could make the 2nd pattern from scratch rather than rotating a duplicate of the Pattern1 layer. I went with the latter to make the tutorial quicker to follow.

Enter Pattern2's Layer Style, and set the Color Overlay color value to FFDFC2.

That completes the camouflage pattern:

Prepare the Cloth Texture

SXC provides an abundance of freely downloadable cloth images. I recommend this one for following this tutorial. We'll need the full-resolution image, so click on the thumbnail in the middle of that page to download it, and then load it into Photoshop.

Since we already have the colors we want for the pattern, the first thing to do is Desaturate the cloth image, by pressing SHIFT+CTRL+U. This will leave us with a simple grayscale texture.

The cloth also needs to cover our entire camouflage image, so we'll enlarge it for now.

Generally, you want to avoid enlarging anything because doing so will always blur up its fine details. But we will downscale the final composition to a fraction of the working size, which will offset the enlarging done here several times over.

Go to Image > Image Size and resize the cloth to 2250px by 1500px. Be sure you're scaling by pixels and not percent, as shown to the above right.

Add and Apply the Cloth Texture

Press CTRL+A to select the entire cloth image, and press CTRL+C to copy it. Then go back to the camouflage image, be sure the Pattern2 layer is selected, and paste the cloth onto it by pressing CTRL+V.

The cloth should now be on top of the camouflage.

Now change the layer mode to Overlay, and rename the layer to "Overlay," as shown to the right.

What an Overlay layer does is it combines its lightness and color values with the image underneath it. In our case, it applies the cloth texture to the underlying cumulative camouflage pattern we made.

The effect is a little harsh as it is, so set the Overlay layer's opacity to about 50%.

At this point, you should be looking at something like this:

Duplicate the Overlay layer to bring out more shades and highlights; note that two Overlay layers each set to 50% opacity yield a different result than the full effect of a single Overlay layer. Duplicate it once more.

You should now be looking at something like this:

Organize the Photoshop Layer Pallet

At this point, our Layers pallet is beginning to clutter. It's good practice to keep it crisp and tidy, so lets organize it with a couple of folders, or Layer Sets.

Click on the small Create a new set icon at the bottom of the pallet, as shown to the right.

Rename the set to "Camouflage," and drag the two Pattern layers into it.

You can't move the bottom layer since it's a locked Background layer. To fix that, hold the ALT key and double-click it. This will convert it into a regular layer, named "Layer 0." Rename it "Background," and put it into the Camouflage set as well.

Collapse the Camouflage layer set.

Create another set, name it "Cloth," and drag the 3 Overlay layers into it. I also went ahead and renamed the Overlay layers sequentially.

Doing this makes things increasingly easier to find as the Layers pallet becomes more and more populated.

Leave the Cloth set open since we still need to do a couple of things with it.

Touch Up the Cloth Effect

The cloth could use brightening. Duplicate the Overlay3 layer, change its layer mode from Overlay to Color Dodge and opacity to about 25%, and name it "Color Dodge."

This is what I'm now looking at:

The trouble now are the black spots. Notice there is no texture showing in them. That is because the two layer modes we've used so far, Overlay and Color Dodge, do not affect pure black. We need to apply Linear Dodge to the black areas.

However, we don't want to make any further changes to the rest of the image. So we need to isolate only the pure black pixels.

Isolating the Black Pixels

Click over to the Channels pallet.

By default, it's right next to the Layers pallet. If you don't see the Channels tab, you can access it via the menu: Window > Channels.

Here, we're given 3 channels that contain the color information for the image, plus the composite RGB channel.

Here's a quick explanation of what this pallet does. In each of the Red, Green, and Blue channels, the amount of the corresponding color that appears in the full color image is represented by intensities of white. For example, in the Red channel, the whitest areas represent the reddest areas in the full color image. The dark areas are simply degrees of blankness, or transparency.

We're not going to use this functionality for the purpose of color manipulation. But we are going to use these channels to make a selection of the image's black pixels.

First select the channel that offers the highest contrast, which is the Red channel. Duplicate this channel by dragging it onto the small Create new channel button at the bottom of the pallet, as shown to the right.

Next, go to Image > Adjustments > Threshold again, and this time drag the slider all the way to the left.

Click OK, and you will wind up with a high contrast black and white image that effectively isolates, at this point, every non-black pixel. So we need to get a reversed selection of this channel's contents.

Hold CTRL and click on the Red copy channel's thumbnail to select it. Then press CTRL+SHIFT+I to inverse the selection. We now have a selection of every black pixel in the image.

With the selection still active, click on the RGB channel to go back to full color mode, and then return to the Layers pallet.

Add Texture to the Black Spots

With selection still active, duplicate the Color Dodge layer.

You will see, by its thumbnail, that the new layer has only duplicated the content from the Color Dodge layer that was within the confines of the selection.

Change this layer's mode from Color Dodge to Linear Dodge, and slightly raise the opacity. You should see the threads appear over all the black areas.

Finishing Up

Make any final adjustments to your image.

Here is mine, scaled down to 500 pixels.

Using Different Patterns and Textures

Keep in mind the exact process we used here is not universal. Experiment especially with different combinations of all the available layer modes. Overlay and Dodge layers produced nice results in this case, but may be completely wrong in images with different light and color values. Do some trial and error and you'll eventually find the best configuration of effects for your project.

Continue Reading:

• Smooth (Long-Exposure) Waterfall Effect
• Add a Realistic Rainbow to Your Photograph 1
• Add a Realistic Rainbow to Your Photograph 2
• Colorize a Black & White Photograph Image
• The CSS Letter-Spacing & BR Tag Glitch

Also See:

Categories: Photoshop

Tags: camouflage . cloth . pattern . realistic . texture