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.
I think you’ve priced them quite fairly, although I’d love a sweet bundle price for all of them. My problem right now is I can’t figure out which ones to buy first!
What would I pay? $5 each, how about $40 for 10. Could you charge more? Lol, I hate to say it but heck yes, absolutely. I understand the R&D work you have putting into these things when I see your Layer Options, the “Smart Surfaces Presets”, etc. It’s a lot of work for you and, on my side, EACH single texture is going to have a LOT of combine-able, tweak-able looks. I know I am not just buying a overly compressed “papertexture.jpg” so, make these things a reality and then take my money, lol.
Any product like your Art Surfaces literally do not exist anywhere else. (That I have ever yet found and I have been looking for exactly what you are creating here!)
Thanks for taking the time to share these thoughts, that’s really useful. Your pricing suggestions are somewhere around what I am thinking of now. I really like to keep them affordable and accessible to as many people as want them but I also need to figure out a way to make it something sustainable on my end so I really appreciate the feedback. Thanks a ton as always. I can’t wait to see what you create on them!!
I understand your pain as far as filesize goes. When I scan my own paper textures I gravitate to my end result being a seamless, 2K+, 300dpi, 48-bit color “template” texture. Obviously, for my personal creation and use, filesize doesn’t matter but, for you and transmitting these files as downloadable assets I realize you want to have it as few MB’s as possible, lol. Yet, with what you are going for, with your Art Surfaces being so customizable, flexible and professional, the large filesizes are just going to be a part of it. Sucks but, you use SO many more awesome PS tweaks along with with your paper textures than I do, I can NOT wait to get my hands on them! They look amazing.
Thanks for your thoughts, that’s really great insight!