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In this tutorial I will be explaining the Displace filter. This filter may look kind of difficult when the popups with settings comes up, but it can be used to create great looking distortion and raw background texture. First, I’m going to show you the difference in results when you use a different type of image. In this tutorial I will be using this image from GameWallpapers to show you the difference depending on the texture of the image you use.

The image we will start with:

First of all, you can use the filter by going to Filter > Distort > Displace. a screen will come up asking you for settings. For the start of the tutorial, I will be using the standard settings, which are horizontal scale: 10, vertical scale: 10, Stretch to Fit and Repeat Edge Pixels:

After picking these settings, you have to select a PSD file to displace it with.

I’m going to create a pretty soft image with a few randomly drawn lines, after which I will use the Displace filter. This image has little texture and there’s not much going on.

I will apply the Displace filter (Filter > Distort > Displace, standard settings) with this file:

You can clearly see the lines drawn into this file. It already looks kind of twirly, which we can use for some nice textures. To test some more, I drew the following image and smudged it a bit:

My result after displacing our Lara Croft:

Now if you change the standard settings to Tile and Wrap around, the result will not vary much:

Lets add a little bit more detail to the PSD we’re displacing with, I randomly brushed, smudged, sharpened, blurred and so forth to create this image:

Now after displacing with the standard settings:

Not good enough, need more detail! Experiment with settings, this is what I’ve done:

my result:

Now this is something I’m going to work with. You can use this effect to create a background or texture that matches a good looking render, however it does not really remind people of the original image. For example, if you smudge this background, this is what you might get:

With some (admittingly poor) coloring and transforming:

Well, we now used the displace filter and some smudging to create our background. You can continue to do whatever with it, make a signature, a texture, and so forth. A possible example could be this poorly made (sorry, sleepy!) signature: