Apr 6, 2012

Design a Photo-Realistic Metal Chain in Photoshop

Making photo-realistic metal chains in Photoshop is remarkably easy. All we need is the Type tool and a few layer blending options. In this tutorial, we'll first go through creating a metal chain look for your interface designs, and then build on that to make it photo-realistic, with 2 variations: a rusty and a shiny metal chain.






Create a new document, 500x500 - that should be enough space to play around in. Now, using the Type tool, choose Arial as your font and something big, around 70px for the font size.
Type a 0 (zero) and an I (capital i) in the document, and position the I right above the 0. Like this:

This is how we begin to build our metal chain. Duplicate these two layers until you reach near the top of the document.

Now we just remove the last "I" that's on top of the document. After that, grab each letter separately and using Ctrl + T (Cmd + T on Mac), rotate and position them to get something similar to the following form:

With that, we are halfway to our realistic metal chain. First, we'll apply layer blending modes to get a metal chain look that you'll be able to use in your interface designs. Open up the layer blending options for any of the "chain parts" (any letter). Follow the screenshots below to adjust it appropriately.





And here's how our first letter looks like:

Holding down the Alt (Option) key on your keyboard, click and drag from the "effects" icon on the layer (marked with ƒx) to the other layers from the chain. And there, we have our own metal chain in photoshop.
On the next page, I'll explain the changes to the layer styles needed to get the a realistic rusty look and a shiny new metal chain.
I've grabbed this photo from Horia Varlan of a Trash bin for the shiny metal chain example. Copy and paste it into your document, and then rotate the metal chain until you get it in the following position:

First, group all your layers, select them all in the layer panel and hit Ctrl + G, or Cmd + G on Mac. Duplicate the group, and hide the original. We do this so you can keep the original and make the rusty chain modifications later. Merge your new group - select it in the layers panel and hit Ctrl + E, or Cmd + E on Mac. Using the Eraser tool, remove the part of the chain overlaying the padlock as you see above, to get a more realistic effect. Since nothing is as clear in the real world, we'll add a small texture to the layer to make it "dirtier". Open the layer blending options for your new layer and use the following settings:


As you can see from the screenshot above, the texture can be found under Rock Patterns. Play around with different settings if your photo differs in clarity or light, to better match the look of the chain.
Next, we'll try and get the rusty metal chain effect. Hide all your previous layers, and show the original group you hid before.
I grabbed this great picture of a Rusty door by Jos Dielis for this tutorial.
Starting with our original group, you should have something like this:

We need to match the look of the chain to the rustiness of the door. Merge your group again so you only get 1 layer. Let's open up the layer blending options again and through experimenting, I've found the following options to give us the desired effect:


Now we have our realistic rusty metal chain:

The chain is a bit too big to realisticly fit in this picture, so let's scale (resize) it a bit and rotate it to a better position in the picture.

That's it! We've now seen how to get a metal chain for your interface and explored how to make it photo-realistic so that we can do photo manipulations for both shiny new metal chains and rusty ones. If you have any questions or comments, please let us know below.

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