Well, I guess I should try to create a wee tutorial here. I've heard some would like to know how to create the brushed metal look Which is quite easy. So fire up your PhotoShop if it isn't opened already. ( You can do this in Paint Shop Pro as well, but since I uninstalled it, I can't tell you exactly where you will find what you need, but you should be able to find it yourself) In the tutorial I've used small screenshots (usually part of screen), I set them as low jpg quality, since they are guidelines and means for you to check whether you're following along.

1. Open a new document, you can choose your size, but I do recommend choosing at least 640×480 Now again I will let you choose, you may start with a transparent background or a white background. It doesn't matter anyway. So you're free to choose. I started with white background since it's smaller in memory
   
2. Set your foreground colour to a middle dark grey, if you want to create a more aluminum looking brushed metal you should pick a soft grey, if you want to create some titanium look you should pick a dark grey. I opted for an inbetween choice #8F8F8F.
   
3. Now with your Rectangular Marquee Tool , select a rectangular over the full height of your document, but only about 30 px wide.
   
4. Floodfill the selection with the grey you've set as foreground colour in step 2.
   
5. You should now have a huge document, with a small grey area which is still selected. Then go to Filter - Noise - Add Noise. Now again, I leave a choice upto you, keep in mind you can always go back and redo. If you want deep and hard brush strokes, then select Gaussian Noise, if you prefer subtle effects then go for Uniform Noise. <b>But always check Monochromatic! </b>These were my settings
   
   
6. Go to Edit - Free Transform. Drag the right side (do not change the height) all the way over to the size of the document, or even as far as PhotoShop allows you Then you get some weird result like on following image, but don't fear, once you clicked the V to apply the transformation it will be ok.
   
   [PICFRAME=center]http://img135.echo.cx/img135/9098/previewtransform3ox.jpg[/picframe]
   
7. Now it should be close to looking how it should be. You can leave it as is, or you can do another Free Transformation and refine the brushed metal. If you want to leave it as is, skip to the last step.
   
8. Now, press Ctrl + D to deselect, and go to Rectangular Marquee again and select a small section, with the same height as your document. The width of your selection will determine the "strictness" of your metal. The finer your selection is the more straight your "lines" will be. So this step depends on your personal flavour. Here are 2 previews on different widths.
   
   [PICFRAME=center]http://img59.echo.cx/img59/3117/preview50width3of.jpg[/picframe]
   [PICFRAME=center]http://img126.echo.cx/img126/889/preview200width9ji.jpg[/picframe]
   
9. I prefer how the 200 width one looks So select your desired width with the Rectangular Marquee Tool, the go to Edit - Free Transform, and drag the right side over the document and apply
   
10. And now you're done, you've hopefully finished a nice piece of brushed metal. If you save this for the web, choose "File - Save For Web" and make sure you have jpg Medium or High selected on the right pane. If you have low or gif selected, your brushed metal will lose so much detail, it will look horrible.

I hope you enjoyed this, I know I have This was my very first tut, so be nice

nice moonwitch, another nice and easy tutorial for the forum. and congrats on including screen shots

I am not that good in PhotoShop but I am learning, I used to be a PSP addict, and I learnt PSP by doing heaps of tutorials, I even was a member of a tut group, where you had to do a tut a week and show the results. After a while I got fed up, since mostly it was using special filters and tubes, where's the special art in that (I am refering to Super Blade Pro, Eye Candy, Xenofex, DragonFly etc etc, even though Eye Candy is good). Usually they just gave you a list of filters to get, fonts to get and tubes to get and then follow a list of things to do and you had a standard image. I also got fed up with the extensive use of frames. I mean, how much framework is needed? So I quit. I even stopped using PSP, til a friend (RainboxPhoenix, he's a member here) finally convinced me to try PhotoShop. And I did some tuts for PS and deleted PSP Never been happier

But anyhow, the screenshots, I did because a lot of tuts have screenshots so I thought it was a small must (I think it can be handy to prevent freaking out LOL) It was my first tutorial so I appreciate your feedback a lot. Thank you

Very nice tutorial moonwitch.

That's almost exactly how I do it too. Brushed metal is such a popular texture it is nice to have an explaination of how to do it. Wish that I had had such a nice tutorial about this when I tried it the first time.

I do have one tip:
    [/tab]After you get your grain the way you like it, you may want to soften the image a little with motion blur. This will remove some of the sharp detail keeping the viewers eye from focusing on one place on the image. This also makes wallpapering with the image a little easier. I usually resize the canvas a few pixels smaller to ensure that I don't have sharp edges on the image.

Oh, another tip:
[tab]Adding a new transparent layer to the image with a color tint will give your image a futuristic look. I use the paint bucket (Floodfill) button and set the opacity to 10%. Select a bright color like green. This gives the image a greenish tint and makes for an interesting border and button texture.

Once again, great work moonwitch.
I look forward to more CG tutorials from you.

vujsa

nice tutorial. looks like it would really help some people. Ill never use it though, because it looks like it takes time

Actually Drover, it's not a long tutorial, but I tried to include some "personalization" choices. It's fairly short, but I wrote it so new PS users could do it too (hence the little images of the tools). I didn't mention cropping and all that, because that's fairly obvious Most know how to do that. The downside is though that it's not tileable, I've solved it though, which will make another tutorial I hope

Nice tutorial, very in depth and fairly easy to understand.. even for new PS'ers. Nice to include the images for easy reference.

This is amazing coz you can do it with any colour.
thanks very much, I have used it to make a website background, it looks great.
thanks again!