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While grunge has its origins in the 90s, recently the style has been gaining in popularity once more. In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a dirty, urban-style image using both well-known techniques as well as a few new ones. You will learn to easily extract complex shapes and we will also create our own grunge texture.
What We’re Making
This is the final image we will create:
Preparation
This tutorial is very stock-heavy. Since the basic theme of the image will be “music,” I gathered a few stock images from iStockPhoto. I suggest that you also choose a theme and gather a bunch of stock images you think will be useful before you start creating the image. Here are links to the ones I used: Girl, Speakers, Boombox
Step 1
Before we start with the stock, we will quickly create a texture for later use.
So create a new document. I used 800 x 600px for my canvas size. Make sure your foreground color is black and your background color is white. You can simply press D on your keyboard to do that.
Add a new layer and go to Filter > Render > Clouds. Then go to Filter > Noise > Add Noise. Choose the following settings: Amount 50%; Distribution = Uniform; Monochromatic = On. After that, use Filter > Artistic > Dry Brush with settings: Brush Size = 2; Brush Detail = 8; Texture = 1.
Now again, add some noise by going to Filter > Noise > Add Noise and use the previous settings. Then use Filter > Artistic > Paint Daubs with the settings shown in the screenshot:
Step 2
Now use Filter > Brush Strokes > Splatter with Spray Radius = 20 and Smoothness = 5. Your image should look like this:
Step 3
Go to Select > Color Range, choose Highlights, hit OK, and you will see that random areas in your texture are now selected. We will delete them by pressing Delete. Also, delete the background layer and you’re done with your texture! Save it, we’ll use it later.
Step 4
Now we will just cut out all the images that we will use for our further work and save them.
You can do that by using the Pen Tool (P). If you have a complex shape that you want to select accurately (i.e. hairstrands), then fear not because I will show you a very useful technique in the following steps.
The model in the stock photo I’m using has very fine hair strands. We want to select her body shape while also accurately selecting the fine hair strands. In order to do this, go to the Channels palette and identify the channel with the highest contrast between the model and background. In this case, I chose the green channel and duplicated it. Make sure the channel is selected and not hidden.
Step 5
Our goal is to make a selection of the model. The model should be solid black and the background as white as possible. With that in mind, we need to paint the headphones and the model’s top solid black, as they are too bright. So trace around those parts and fill the selection with solid black.
Step 6
Press Ctrl+M to open up the curves window and drag the two controllers further together to raise the contrast between model and background. You might need to repeat this a few times. In the end there may still be some bright parts. Quickly trace around them and fill them with black.
Step 7
If you’re satisfied with the result, Ctrl-click the channel to make a selection. Press Shift+Ctrl+I to invert the selection or go to Select > Invert. Now click on the RGB channel and copy+paste the selection into a new 800×600px file. Voila! You have selected the model with all the fine hairstrands.
Step 8
We want to give the model a distressed look. Desaturate the model (Shift+Ctrl+U) and duplicate the layer. Set the duplicated layer to Multiply and make sure it’s on top. Select this layer, open up the curves window again (Ctrl+M), and raise the contrast until you like the result.
Step 9
Desaturate the other images, add them to the model, and make a nice composition.
Step 10
For the next step, we will use some damaged paper as a texture. Just scan some crinkled paper or try to make a picture with your camera. You can download my paper texture here.
Step 11
Paste the texture above our image and set the layer style to Multiply. If necessary you should also desaturate it and raise the contrast a bit. Flatten the image and make a rough selection of the objects, like below:
Step 12
Paste the selection into a new file and add the texture we made in the beginning. Set the Opacity of the texture to 15% so it’s more of a background effect.
Fill the background layer of the new file with a color of your choice to give the image more life by making the paper cutouts really contrast out from the background. I also added some notes that I quickly scribbled by using a small, round brush and then followed the same paper texture technique.
Don’t forget to add drop shadows to your objects. This way they will look like they were cut out of paper and pasted on top.
Step 13
Next I’ve added some halftone effects and swirl brushes as well as some splatter brushes. If you don’t know how to make halftone effects, check out Sean’s Halftone Tutorial. For swirl/splatter brushes go to DeviantART or Brusheezy.com. Besides that, I added an image of a cityscape. You can find some great scapes for free at Sxc.hu. When you find an appropriate image, desaturate the cityscape, boost up the contrast and set it to multiply to get the effect in the final image below.
Conclusion
I am sure that the textures you created and used during this tutorial will be very useful for some of your following projects. I also believe that the new technique I showed you to extract complex shapes will also help you in your further work. You might have realized that we didn’t necessarily need to cut out the hair so exactly, since we pasted the model to a plain white canvas. However, I thought this would be a great opportunity for me to show you this technique 
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By Markus
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Thank you for sharing this. Beautiful Artwork
brilliant style – some of the techniques you used are top notch. cheers
I really like this kind of art. Thanks for tutorial.
Очень краÑиво, люблю такой Ñтиль!
Trop pérav ! t’as découvert photoshop hier toi non ?!
tu t’éclates comme un hamster dans une boule ! Yeahaaaa !
sry i got lost at step 5 =[
i love it so much ,it give a means to creat new things
很喜欢他,她给我一ç§æ–°çš„设计手法,这里我觉得ä¸ä»…仅给的是教程,而是一ç§è®¾è®¡æ‰‹æ³•,而ä¸åƒæœ‰äº›æ•™ç¨‹,åªæ˜¯æ‰‹æ³•çš„积累,SO LOVE IT ,THANK YOU
Great tutorial as always, thanks for sharing.
this was fantastic..i used what i learned and ended up making a flyer for my friends band!..you rawk!..thanks for the tut!
STUMBLED!
Another fantastic tutorial.
VOTED for you at:
http://www.newsdots.com/design/psdtuts-photoshop-tutorials-and-links-creating-an-urban-style-piece-of-artwork/
Design yang cantik . . . Jadi banyak belajar nich trima kasih yach, i hope you understand what i say btw thanx for your great design
Great tutorial! I would love to use it in my current joomla template for church websites.
Cheers! this tut is really cool! nicley done!
Very good tutorial. Interesting techniques & really great work!
Its very nice creativity.
The Tutorial is very good, the composition/color/artwork total great.
But I don’t get the swirl brush thing…
The pinky swirl thing u did is definetly not just a brush…-.-
anyway really good =)
http://www.partytimerent.com/
SOme one its making money…..
slow clap!! very very nice…eye popping!
Thanks for Posting.
Excellent Tut.
Awesome tutorial! It was really helpful! I used it here: http://justhat1girl.deviantart.com/art/Punk-Rock-Lovestory-94209580
Cool tut ! Thank you for share !
Thank you for sharing your grunge tutorial especially your selection technique. It worked great for me. Thanks!
Great!
Great!
Great!
Great tutorial!……………………………………………………………………………….;)Tq for sharing.
Okay, I’m already stuck on the first step. If my “artistic” brushes are not options, what do I do? I can’t continue until I figure this out.
Some days I’m too dense for words!
Hi can anyone help a damsel in distress?
Is there a step missing between Step 5 and Step 6??
There is a box on the as the picture of the woman that says “Create vector mask, Delete path, Define custom shape, Make selection….â€
Where are the instructions of where to find these menus. I tried without them and only got ONE black line in the curves window from bottom left to top right and NO curves.
Has anyone tested this tutorial as I couldn’t go any furhter
this is sick!!!
Truly amazing, thanks a lot for the masking part, i’m gonna use it a lot!
Cannot be compared with your artwork though…
but here is mine
http://whizkid86.deviantart.com/art/Retro-Love-story-112264114
I really liked working on it
thanks A lot!!
Hi..i’m new at using photoshop, so it was a little messy at first!! (while trying to do the right thing with the girl) but at last it worked perfectly!! thanx a lot!!
Thank you for the tut.
http://santidiablo.deviantart.com/art/Kaley-113292612
Really nice work
hey vj
yoooooooooooo jimmy boy, what’s up, how you doin’?
Very nice.
Oh bro that impressed me.
Quite impressive…
Trully awesome!
great…
Wow. Love the technique for cutting out the model with the fine hair strands preserved perfectly. Thanks for sharing.
Keep up the great work.
Another try…
http://i39.tinypic.com/qzgakx.jpg
Thanks!!
Thank you
very very nice tutorial
cheers
it is very very nice and usefull to me
good and nice
thanks Markus, good work
great job
yea thanks for showing how to do the easy stuff and tell us to go different places for the cool hard part. =(
Awesome Dude this was a gr8 help 4 my project.. keep it up learn and make others learn also
..
I have to thank you! I have a really big project due tomorrow for my graphics class and this helped me so much! It is a great tutorial! ^^ Thanks again dude, you’re a life saver!! ^_^