Leather effect with Photoshop - how it works

With the stained glass filter in Photoshop you can achieve a noble leather effect. We show you exactly how this works in this manual.

Photoshop: creating a leather effect

Note: To simplify matters, we have put together the individual steps in the picture gallery, including the screenshots.

1. Open a new image with a white background. Via Filters -> Structuring Filters -> Stained Glass Mosaic you create the basis for the leather structure. The foreground color should be black, the background color white.
2. Create a new layer that you fill with white and reduce its opacity to 50 percent. Then apply the stained glass mosaic filter again.
3. Reduce the levels using the "Reduce with one below to one level" item, which you can find under "Level". Then navigate to Filter -> Noise Filter -> Add Noise. Set the strength to 20 percent and tick "Monochrome".
4. Use the shortcut Ctrl + A to select everything, copy the selection and switch to the channel view. Create a new channel here and paste the clipboard. Then click on the RGB channel in the channel view and return to the layer view.
5. Now choose a dark foreground color. In our example we used the value # 2f2f2f. Fill the layer with "Edit -> Fill area" with the selected color.
6. Now it is important to make the leather structure visible on the dark level. You can do this with the lighting effects. You can find these under "Filters" and "Rendering Filters". Select "Spot" as the light type, "Alpha1" as the relief channel and confirm the filter.
7. Start the lighting effects again. This time you select "Illuminator" as the light type, 15 as the intensity and again the "Alpha1" relief channel. Place the point in the top right corner. Now you have to add four more spotlights - one for the other three corners and one for the middle. You can add spotlights by clicking on the light bulb symbol at the bottom and dragging it to the preview field. Confirm by clicking on "OK".