Diamond Plate Metal Tutorial Author - Man1c M0g (http://forums.biorust.com/member.php?userid=1)

Contrary to popular opinion, industrial metallic textures are not always easy to create from scratch in Photoshop.  A brushed metal here, a quick gradient there - the simple methods remain the same, but industrial texturing also makes extensive use of repeating patterns which take considerably longer to create and can be difficult to plan, especially when they have to tile seamlessly.

This tutorial details a relatively straightforward way to create diamond-patterned metal plates, often used for walkways and other industrial-style constructs.  The results are highly individual and leave lots of room for subsequent modification with weathering effects, lighter/darker metals, etc.
 

Step 1:  Create a new document with a single white-filled background layer. We need this image to be bigger than usual for subsequent cropping, so make the canvas 768px*768px with a resolution of 72dpi. To enable us to precisely plan and place all our components, we need to set up a grid with proper 'snapping' to make aligning that much easier. To do this, go to Edit > Preferences > Guides, Grid & Slices and enter in the Grid settings on the left.

Step 2: Press OK, and then make sure View > Show > Grid and View > Snap are checked. You should now be presented with a document that looks a little like the image on the left.  This grid is just like regular graph paper, with each darkly-colored block representing 32px, and the lighter-blocks 16px in size.  With snapping on you will notice that it is much easier to place objects and marquee selections along the gridlines.  Of course, you CAN override the snapping quite easily and use cursor keys, but your results will not come out as intended if you go down this route.  Try and use ONLY the mouse for the rest of this tutorial.

Step 3: Create a new transparent layer on top of your Background and make it active in the layers palette.  Using the elliptical marquee tool and Edit > Fill, draw black-filled ovals as shown in the design schematic to the left.  Take great care to get the proportions correct.  Each oval should be 4 big squares long, 1 big square thick, and 1.5 big squares away from its nearest neighbour.    Repeat this pattern for the entire canvas before proceeding any further.

Step 4: Turn off the grid for now by unchecking View > Show > Grid, hide the diamond-pattern layer, and replace the background layer with a metallic texture of your choosing.   How you do this is entirely up to you, but if you want something quickly, you should probably follow our Realistic Metal and/or Brushed Metal tutorials.   I added some faint scratches in my metal for extra fun.

Step 5: With the diamond-pattern layer now visible again and selected in the layer palette, select Layer > Blending Options from the main menu and enter in the settings below into the appropriately-named sections.   Press OK when finished.

Step 6: Duplicate the Background layer and drag the copy to the top of the layer stack.  Set this layer's Opacity to 25% and the Fill to 50%.  You can add subtle effects to this layer if you want, but remember that very visible marks will look awful if the texture is to be tiled later. Check your geometry one final time to ensure that everything is perfectly in place, and then Layer > Flatten Image when you are happy to merge all your layers into a single Background layer.

We now take a few extra steps to make the texture look much better and enable it to be seamlessly tiling.  You can omit these stages if you like, but its not recommended. Step 7: Select Image > Rotate Canvas > Arbitrary from the main menu and enter a value of 45 degrees with either a CW or CCW rotation.  Press OK, and you should end up with a diamond-shaped image that resembles the one on the left. Turn your grid back on and select the rectangular marquee tool.  With the Style set to a fixed aspect ratio of 1:1, create a perfectly-square selection that occupies as much of the center as possible.  The image to the left shows exactly what I mean, and the snap functions mediated by the grid makes this type of selection much easier to attain.

Step 8: With the selection still active, Edit > Copy your selection into the clipboard and create a new document 544px*544px in size.  Edit > Paste your selection into this new document and you're finished! Your new texture should tile perfectly and resize smaller with minimal loss of quality.  Note:  Of course, it *IS* possible to omit large parts of step 7+8 by just reducing the canvas size of the rotated image to 544px*544px, but that cuts out a technique that I find genuinely useful, especially for geometric textures such as our diamond-patterned plate metal.

Alternative: As you may have noticed, our 'diamond-shaped' pattern above is actually entirely made up of ovals.  This is no mistake, as 'diamond plate metal' seems to be something of a misnomer in the industry, with true diamond-shaping quite rare. That said, of course, it is possible to create true diamond shapes using Photoshop's inbuilt shape tools, the results of which can be seen on the left.