Realistic Wood Texture in Photoshop

How to make a realistic wood texture from scratch in Photoshop. (Don't be scared, it easy) Also feel free to play around with any of the settings to get different types and styles of wood.

First create a new document whatever size you will need. I'm going to use 256x256. It can always be cropped or scaled down, but enlarging it blurs it.

Next select two colors that are different shades of brown, one light and one dark. I used #6A5C3C for the dark and #AA9471 for the lighter one. Go to Filter>Render>Clouds. Repeat it until you get something that is fairly smooth and does not have any very dark or light spots. This is the base.

Now make a new layer. Fill it with white. Go to Filter>Noise>Add Noise and set it to monochromatic, Gaussian and about 40-50%. Then change the layer's blending mode to Overlay and the opacity to about 40%.

Go to Filter>Blur>Motion Blur. Set the angle to 90 and the distance to around 15.

That is really all there is to making a basic wood texture. But what is you want more?

First you can change the color and lightness of the wood texture.
Go to Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Hue/Saturation and Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Brightness/Contrast. Then you just need to play with those two layers' settings to get whatever look you want.

Dark wood grain:
Create a new layer above all the adjustment layers. Select the brush tool. I use a brush of size 13 and 70 hardness for the grain. Select Black for your color and draw a few lines across the new layer.

Go to Filter>Distort>Wave. Here is the tricky part. Play with the settings until you get something that is sorta wavy but still kinda smooth. You can keep hitting randomize until you get something you like.

Notice how it looks good but there are still a few imperfections. Fix them with the Liquify tool in the Filter menu. Just kinda play around with the blur and pinch tools (or whatever you feel like, you can always hit CANCEL and start over) until you get something you like. You can also use Motion Blur or Gaussian Blur to get it to different looks as well. Just be creative and remember that mother nature isn't perfect so you shouldn't be either.

Change the layer blending option to Overlay and change the opacity to make your wood grain lighter of darker. If you want a different color, you can use the layer style with a color overlay. The possibilities are endless....