What is the best effect for something like this

[pavlovmb]

Hi, 

I'm a rookie and I'm trying to learn by making some really simple designs. I'd like to add a worn effect to something I'm working on now - but I'm not quite sure if I should be looking for an effect, a plugin or a custom brush. What I had in mind is to be able to add a worn look, like for example on this t-shirt: http://www.amazon.com/Juniors-Marvel-Captain-America-T-shirt/dp/B0044MOLU0/- Any ideas? 

Thanks
Martin

[NinthDesertDude]

Basically, there are two goals here: making the texture, and applying it. There are different ways to do these two steps and you can mix-and-match them.

 

Make a texture

Take the t-shirt and filter out unwanted colors, or manually select and delete sections with magic wand tool, or apply other effects until you get the dots by themselves on a transparent background. If the dots have an edge around them, download and apply the AA's Assistant effect.

 

Or, create your own texture with noise rendered on a white background using 0 color saturation and max intensity. Use switch gray to alpha (download it if you don't have it), and you have a rough texture to work with. You can combine multiple noise layers like this (when you make a new layer to do this, you need to have opaque pixels for the noise to render, so color new layers white before applying noise and compositing them). Compositing layers = merging down.

 

Or, create your own texture using a variety of tools and brushes, effects like Fragment, and other image editors, then make the background transparent (if not already) with switch gray to alpha and put it on a new layer. Clone stamp it until it covers your image, or copy it to multiple layers and delete the overlapping parts from each layer (more tedious).

 

Modify the texture

If unhappy with the results, Fragment is a great effect for dotty textures. Also try making small dots larger with Crystalize, and blur the result if necessary using gaussian blur. If the dots are too dense and there is still space between them, use AA's Assistant and edit the settings until the dots have more space around them. Apply the dents effect to warp the positions of the dots, or do it manually with distortion tools like twist that provide a brush to work with.

 

If the texture isn't quite in the right dimensions, go ahead and grab the eraser tool and erase the edges. It might help to use a low hardness for softer edges. You could just make a lot of noise on a separate layer using the noise technique and then, on the same layer, erase around the areas that aren't on top of your image (you don't want a cracked dot pattern outside the boundary of your image). You could also switch to the original image layer, select the background, then switch to the new dotty texture layer and press delete to get rid of all texturing outside the bounds of your original image.

 

Now that the texture is correct, you can color and texture it if you'd like to apply it on top of the original image. Use the magic wand tool to select the transparent background, ensuring that flood mode is global (it's an icon with a picture of a globe), and invert selection to get all the dots selected. Now you can color and texture them without worrying about accidentally coloring/texturing outside the lines. As usual, whenever you texture something, you should do so on a separate layer so it's easier to undo or erase.

 

Use the texture

You can apply the texture on top of the original image as-is. Put it on a separate layer and merge down.

 

You could alternatively select the texture by selecting part of the transparent background with the flood mode option as global (a filled-in globe image), then invert the selection and switch to the original image layer, then delete. This leaves a cut-out.

 

 

Some of these tricks are really nice to remember, like making selections with magic wand on one layer and switching to another layer to use the selection. Hope this helps

Edited February 14, 2016 by AnthonyScoffler

[Ego Eram Reputo]

Try Clouds with the blend mode set to Multiply..

1. Make a selection to cover the logo (you'll want to be a little more accurate than I was)

2. Run Effects > Render > Clouds

3. Blend Mode Multiply

4. Adjust the scale and roughness

Tip: try altering the Primary/Secondary colors for different T-Shirts.

[Eli]

Great mini tutorial EER,

[pavlovmb]

Thank you Ego and Anthony for your suggestions - practicing now 

[Ego Eram Reputo]

Thank you Eli - great job on the paint.net T-shirt. Where can we buy one?