[Award Winner] Photoshop: Using Paths to create textured walls -or- why I hate bevels

[torstan]

This is nice, but it needs to have an extra texture. I set up an extra layer and this time I'll use a hard round brush with lots of scatter (1000%), colour jitter to swap light and dark and a low opacity (around 20-30%). Stroke the path again (make sure the path is selected then hit enter with the brush tool selected) with a few different sizes of this brush. You should have something like this:


Now set this layer to overlay and set the opacity of the overlay layer blend in nicely:


That's the wall highlights sorted.

The wall shadows are just the same trick. In this case set up a new group, and mask this with the inverse of the previous mask. You can do this by selecting the previous mask, right click->Add Mask To Selection, and then use Ctrl/Cmd-shift-I to invert the selection. Click group icon and then click the Add Layer Mask button (to the right of the fx button at the bottom of the Layers dialog).

Now add a layer to the group. This layer will be our base shadow layer. Selec the second path - from the Paths dialog - and then go to your new layer. Choose a nice dark colour, and a large, low opacity grungy brush (again around 5-10% opacity) and hit enter to stroke the path. Reduce the brush size and repeat. This will give a nice grungy shadow:


In this image I have this layer set to multiply at 100%. It's a little overbearing, so I reduce the opacity to 10-20% and create a new layer, this time set to overlay. Repeat the process of stroking the path and you should get something like this:


This way you can set up highlights and shadows for a map of any size, as long as you get your initial selection right. Stroking paths in this way has lots of other uses beyond this kind of wall highlighting. Once you've got used to it here, you'll find many other uses for it elsewhere in your workflow.