Create a Dark and Grungy Poster in Photoshop

By Angie Bowen | Stashed in Design & Drawing

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Overview of the Tutorial

Today were going to be creating the dark and grungy poster you see below. You will also find links to the stock images we will be using in this tutorial. This tutorial focuses heavily on blending images together to achieve a desired effect.

The Files

Step 1
Open image 1 in photoshop. While searching for this image all I was looking for was the general layout and colors. Keep this in mind if youre following the tutorial using your own images and going your own way with it.

Now were going to apply a gaussian blur which will leave the overall color and feel of the image without any of the detail.

Adjust the radius until you have exactly what you need. This will usually fall somewhere between 40 and 80.

This gives us the base for our background image.

Step 2
Now open image #2 (youll notice there are 5 textures in this pack, I used #103 but you can choose whichever you prefer) and paste it into a new layer. The texture is quite a bit larger than our original image so we need to shrink it down a bit. To do this press ctrl+t and youll see the border of the texture extending beyond the poster.

Grab the corner that extends beyond the image and drag it up to the corner of the image. Since this is just a texture it doesnt matter that were warping it a bit. That will just add to the character :). Then check the green checkmark in the toolbar to commit the transform.

Next we want to find a good way to blend the two layers allowing our texture to add some grungyness to our background. Well do this with with layer blending mode and opacity.

I ended up going with Pin Light with an opacity of 52%, but you can just play around with it until you find something you like.

Step 3
Next were going to add some shadows to the edges to give the background some depth. Create a new layer and with a 100px brush create a black border with some variance where you would like to have more/less shadows. It doesnt have to look good at this point, we just need a rough border.

Apply gaussian blur to this layer and take the radius all the way up to 250 this time.

And now we have our grungy background.

Step 4
Now its time to add the other elements. Paste the door image into a new layer and resize it (using ctrl+t). Only this time we want to maintain the proportions of the door, so hold down the shift key while resizing.

We just want the door, nothing around it so select the rectangular marquee tool and select the door.

Go to select and choose inverse to select all of the image around the door and hit delete to get rid of it.

Now were left with just the door floating out among our background. Press ctrl+d to clear the selection.

Step 5
We want the door to blend in with the background so set the door layer to darken with an opacity of 75%. Again, you can play with different settings to find something you like.

Step 6
Now we need to clean up the door a bit. Notice that there is a line left over at the bottom of the door. Since we want it to look like the door is completely blending into the background, we want to erase that line. We also want to get rid of the wire running across the door. Well use the clone tool to do that. If you dont know how the clone tool works, see The Basics in Useful Applications for the Clone Stamp Tool.

Step 7
Now its time to add the words. I want to do Breaking Barriers where the two words share the B. So first, lets do a single uppercase B around 500px in size. Now add the rest of the words in a size around 200px and position them as you see in the image.

Step 8
Select all three layers and rasterize then merge them. Set the merged layer to Overlay with an opacity of 100%. The text ended up being a bit more of a brown than I would have liked, I want to make it more of a red like the door. So we double click on the preview image of the text layer to bring up the layer style box. Check Color Overlay, choose a fairly bright red then bring the opacity down to aprox 20%.

Reposition the text to your liking and were finished.

Final Thoughts
So thats it for this tutorial. I hope this explains well enough the process I use to develop our wallpapers and such. We actually had a reader request this type of tutorial from us and we hope it shone a little light in some new areas. Leave me a comment to let us know what you thought of the tutorial and how your design turned out if you worked through it.