Freelance Graphic Designer London

How to do distressed, grunge or rubber stamp designs in Photoshop

Put type or whatever you want distressed, grunged or “rubber stamped” on one layer in Photoshop with a white background layer beneath it. The create a blank layer above it (Cmd/Ctl-Opt-Shift-N).

Then you need to create some clouds. Very easy. First of all make sure your background and foreground colours in the Tools palette are the default black and white. To do this click on the tiny black and white squares in the Tools palette to the bottom left hand corner of the foreground and background colours. Or, simply press D!

Now (see below) and go Filter > Render > Clouds.

Once you have your clouds you need to get rid of all the greys and turn the layer into just black and white. There are a number of ways to do this: Go Image > Adjustments > Curves (Cmd/Ctl-M) and alter the line as seen above or you could go Image > Adjustments > Threshold. (You can get the same effect through Contrast or Levels, in fact!)

Set this layer’s Blending Mode to Screen, Color Dodge or Linear Dodge and play around with the opacity. To get the “holes” smaller on this “dalmation dog” layer, make the layer smaller with Free Transform (Cmd/Ctl-T) and copy it (Option-click and drag the layer with the Move Tool (V) so it covers the desired area.

You can see in areas of the top, pink grunge picture I have copied some “dalmation dog” layers over other “dalmation dog” layers to create a specially distressed effect!