What’s up friends?, it’s been a while since we post our latest tip, and that’s why we want to show you a trick that not everyone is aware of even with it’s very easy to do. We’re talking about making a great leather texture in Photoshop in less than 2 minutes, we even recorded it so you can compete with one of our designers to see how makes the best time mark, you will find the video at the end of the article.

Make a new document

When you make textures in Photoshop, it’s important to do them in squared frames, not to big because the idea is to repeat them as a pattern, so you can start with a 500 px X 500 px document, RGB color mode and 72 dpi.

Creating the main texture

Now that we have our document, first of all you must duplicate the original layer (Right click and choose duplicate layer) and then select the bottom layer to add a filter to it. This will be the starting filter that will later define the texture, go to Filters>Texture>Stained Glass.

Set up the filter as you wish, just try to remember how a leather texture looks like.

Then select the second layer and repeat the filter, but after applying it, reduce the layer’s opacity to 20 %, that will give a lot of richness to our leather texture.

Now you need to flatten the image and proceed by adding some noise to our texture, remember that we’re after a realistic result.

Do not exaggerate with the noise because that will mess up all the previous work that we made with the stained glass filter.

Working with Channels

Good, the next thing to do is something that not every Photoshop user knows about. Select all the canvas (Ctrl + A or Select>All), then hit Ctrl + C to copy our texture.

Look at the layers panel and click on the Channels tab, this is where we’re going to paste our texture.

Now click on the add new channel button and you will see an Alpha channel appear below the RGB channels.

And then paste your texture on the Alpha channel (Ctrl +V), after that, select the RGB channel and go back to the layers panel.

Defining our texture’s color

And now let’s add a new fill layer from the panel, this will be the color that will define the texture, so it’s important to think about it a few seconds before choosing it.

In our case we decided to choose a very natural tone that will give the appearance of true leather to our texture.

Awesome, we’re almost done, the next thing to do is select the fill layer and rasterize it, simply male right click over it and select Rasterize layer.

Having the fill layer selected, go to Filters>Render>Lighting Effects, this is where the real magic will take place.

When you access the Lighting Effects panel, the standard visualization will be similar to this:

And to let the magic work, we need to change some specific values. First of all on the Texture Channel form, select our Alpha channel, then switch the light type to Omni and place the bulb icon in one corner, hold Alt and drag to add an additional light focus until you get something like the following screenshot:

As you may have seen, there are some darker areas on the borders, to fix that you need to go to Image>Canvas Size and check the Relative button, then give the canvas a size of –6 px X –6 px.

And that will fix those darker areas, now are texture looks much better and uniform and is ready. Now you now how to create an stunning leather texture in a few steps, check out our YouTube video to see if you can be faster than one of our designers, see you in our next article.

Don’t take our word for it and see it by yourself.