Profile for robotwaste - What's the best way to add a stressed look to your design?

robotwaste aka Tony Persons is 36.13 years old, has been a member since February 20, 2008, has scored 22,502 submissions, giving an average score of 2.06, helping 238 designs get printed.

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Sep 28 '10 by robotwaste
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What's the best way to add a stressed look to your design?

I normally draw everything in vector, but I could export to photoshop if I needed, I guess.

What's the best way to add a stressed look, keeping the design easily printable? Is there a good way to do it in vector? Maybe using a stress layer that's basically going to be the color of the shirt?

If you export a vector design from illustrator to photoshop, can you keep the color layers, and add a stress looking layer on the top, or do you need to flatten the image and then just let the printer do the color separations?

spacesick 2 on Sep 28 '10 at 9:04am

I just came to say "I don't know"

Gar0 on Sep 28 '10 at 9:12am

There are tons of ways, depending on what type of distress you want.

Scuffed leather?
Folded Paper?
Burnt colours?

If you export your image from Illustrator make sure you export to PSD format and select the Write Layers box in the export dialog box. You can't keep the layers if you export from Process to RGB (not that you'd want to necessarily).

Morkki on Sep 28 '10 at 9:30am

Hold on, I whipped up a simple explanation on how to do it in PS.

rhythmdev9 on Sep 28 '10 at 9:32am

wear it weekly for like 10-15 years

Morkki on Sep 28 '10 at 9:35am

First, make a texture. Here a picture of crumpled paper has been turned into a halftoned texture by tweaking the levels to nearly black and white, then making it bitmap using the halftone screen option, turning it back to grayscale and deleting the whites. Then just slap it over your layers:

Select layer (ctrl-click the layer thumbnail)

And using that selection just go through your layers and delete

Ryder Revolution on Sep 28 '10 at 9:36am

here's what i do... and i only work in illustrator because a vector stress can be enlarged to no end.

find an image of a texture like this

then place it on your illustrator artboard.

then livetrace it with the simple trace feature.

set the min. area to zero

toggle the threshold up or down depending how much you want showing.

expand your image.

set the image (should only be a black single color) as the same color as the background color and bring to top layer.

ta daaaaaa

that's how i do it anyway.

Morkki on Sep 28 '10 at 9:38am

But you know, in my opinion distressing is mostly overused and unnecessary. It's okay if it fits the concept but just distressing to make flat surfaces look more "interesting"... I don't like that.

In Illustrator you would have to livetrace the texture. I don't think that's a very good option because you will most likely end up with hundreds or thousands new anchor points making the file too heavy.

Morkki on Sep 28 '10 at 9:40am

Didn't see Ryder's post but yeah. I've never done it in Illustrator myself.

Ryder Revolution on Sep 28 '10 at 9:42am

:)

you should try it sometime. if you know how to alter the trace you can get some pretty crazy patterns.

robotwaste on Sep 28 '10 at 9:43am

Wow. thanks for all the help.

Morkki on Sep 28 '10 at 10:04am

I'll have to play around with livetracing sometime. I lived for so long without it that I'm just sceptical I guess

bottleHeD on Sep 28 '10 at 2:34pm

I use Corel, but I use Illustrator a lot simply for its live-trace option.

Torakamikaze on Sep 28 '10 at 2:36pm

Make it have children!

/middle aged woman joke

SuperRyan on Sep 28 '10 at 2:40pm

I was going to say what Tora said, but he already did, so I won't say it now.

igo2cairo on Sep 28 '10 at 2:46pm

*watches*

Morkki on Sep 28 '10 at 3:42pm

Does my butt look big in distress?

*crickets*

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