I was going through some of my favorite Photoshop sites today, and something occured to me - unless you are up in the Deke McCelland/Kai Krause guru/master level of photoshop godhood, you just aren’t going to be able to perfectly duplicate natural surfaces and textures. By this I mean creating from scratch a surface/shape/texture that is completely photo-realistic. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Photo-realism is not always needed or necessary - a lot of the completely digital stuff I or anyone else does is on the level of illustration. And illustration isn’t supposed to look 100% real. That’s kind of the point.

However, there are lots and *lots* of tutorials out there (and some less than cheap books) that claim to be able to teach you how to make realistic textures from scratch. The end results of these tutorials vary - some are pretty near the mark. Some are good as abstract art. Some miss the target completely. For the beginning digital artist, all of them are a good thing, because they push you to learn the software in ways you might not have thought of before. They show you some neat tricks that you might never have come up with on your own. But what about the next step?

For me, the next step has involved a lot of photo compositing, collage, and digital enhancement. Projects where I either start with a base photograph and do cruel and unusual things to it, or take several photographs and pure digital pieces and mate them in ways nature and a darkroom never intended. For a lot of this work, I find that faking nature just won’t cut it. No matter how good the method for creating dirt, mud, wind, highlights, etc…. nothing beats an actual photograph.

Working from reference shots is nothing new to anyone who has studied art, but there are a lot of people getting into the art/design field who never had any training pior to getting their computer and discovering the possibilities of pixels. There is an attitude I see reflected in a lot of the tutorial/photoshop sites that photoshop is the *only* thing you need to create anything short of a 3-D world. Not true.

Say you’ve digitally created a great sand/gravel texture, but it’s lacking that subconcious oomph that says “real” in the back of your mind. You could play around with the lighting filter, but you could also either find a good shot of dirt/mud/ground or go out with your trusty camera after a rainstorm and snap away. Then you take the digital and the “real” images and mate them.