Easy Stainless Steel Background Tutorial

While working on a piece in photoshop, I stumbled a across an easy, and quick way to create a stainless steel background. In this tutorial, I'll show you my method.

1. Make a document about 50 pixels greater than your intended width for your document. Make the hight your intended hight. If you are using the image for web, 72 ppx is fine; for print, 300 works best.

2. Choose a light grey for your foundation of your background. If you feel the grey is too dark or too light, don't worry we'll fix it later.

3. Add some noise to your image to give us something to work with in making the background. I recommend the setting I used below.

4. To make the "grain" of the stainless steel, we are going to add a motion blur to the image. 

5. You'll notice that the left and right sides or your image are a little frayed. To fix this, go under Image ---> Canvas Size and adjust the width down to the intended size of your background. This is why we added the extra 50 pixels.

You could stop here but to add some variation to the background, add the noise and motion blur again using slightly different setting to get a better result. Also, if your image was too dark/light, add a Brightness and Contrast layer and play with the brightness slider until you're happy.

Final Result:

Enjoy.