Here I am testing one of the Art Surfaces (Meko). Notice how it adds light as well as shadow.
That’s one of the hardest parts to tweak (the distribution of values between light and dark)
It’s difficult to get a good gradient ramp when the details are so fine. It’s much easier to deal with course textures like a gravel road than something that is mostly one tonal value like paper. Too much contrast and you won’t be able to see anything you paint on it, too little and you don’t get any surface definition
While working in 16 or 32 bits per channel would give me more flexibility in tweaking these but these templates are already so large a higher channel bit rate would be impractical. They are already averaging about 85 megabytes per PSD. They are seamless tiles, but they start at 2048 by 2048 pixels, at 300 DPI.
To learn more, try a free one and get on the list to be notified when they’re available go to the new paper textures page
A question for you – what would you pay for one of these and what would you pay for 10 of them? Let me know in the comments.