This month’s article is not so much a Photoshop tip from me, but rather a recommendation as to where you can go to get many Photoshop tips and resources, and that is to one of my favourite Photoshop resources on the web, Texturelabs.
Texturelabs is the brain-child of Brady Erickson who is an artist and designer for the TV and movie industry. In 2018 Brady decided to make his accumulated library of textures and image resources available for the benefit of the creative community for free, and Texturelabs was born. Since then, Brady has been adding to the site frequently and has amassed a huge collection of valuable resources.
You can find the Texturelabs website at https://texturelabs.org/
I think it is easily the best selection of textures available on the web for free. There are a wide range of texture files, all nicely categorised and easy to find, preview and download. There is also a search feature for the textures.
Figure 1 - Texturelabs Textures screen
The textures are extremely high quality, most are 16-bit files, all are available in a range of sizes, many are nearly 8k pixels on the long-edge when downloaded in the largest size.
They are well categorised into categories like Atmosphere, Brick, Concrete, Details, Fabric, Film, Glass, Grunge, Ink/Paint and many more.
In addition to this amazing collection of free textures, Brady also creates some of the best Photoshop (and After Effects) video tutorials on the net. These are also nicely presented on the Texturelabs website with a categorised and searchable interface.
Fig 2 - Texturelabs Tutorials screen
To say that I love Brady’s tutorials is a huge understatement. They are amongst the best I watch, and I always look forward to a new one.
They are usually aimed at creating a particular result but always contain the most wonderful tricks and tips, often with the hidden little features of Photoshop that can be quite buried, and often making you rethink the way you should be doing things in Photoshop. There is always something new, and something to learn in one of Brady’s tutorials for me, and I classify myself as a fairly advanced Photoshop user.
As with the Textures, Brady’s tutorials are free to watch on Youtube (but indexed on, and launchable from the website).
The third section of the Texturelabs site is the Tools section, here Brady makes available a range of tools like plugins, brush sets, actions, gradient map presets, and pattern presets. Many of these are free, but some come at a very small cost.
Fig 3 - Texturelabs Tools screen
Up until recently Brady had the Texturelabs site attached to Patreon, and you could support the site via Patreon. I had been a Patreon supporter for a while. Now however he has disconnected from Patreon and the site is supported via sales in the Tools section. There is also an option in the Tools section to buy a Bulk/Lossless Pass for the textures available on the site, this pass allows a bulk download option and also for the individual download of a lossless PNG format of each texture should you want ultimate detail and quality (the default format is JPG).
I can’t recommend Texturelabs highly enough, there are so many wonderful free resources and tutorials, you really need to check it out and have a good look around the Texturelabs site. Should you make good use of some of the resources you find I also recommend supporting Brady keeping the Texturelabs site going and growing by purchasing something from his tools collection.
This article was first published in the May 2024 issue of Artists Down Under magazine.