Achieving Worn Look

I’m sure many of you have seen the new styles of American Eagle, Abercrombie & Fitch, Aeropostale, Urban Outfitters, among many others. Their clothing line portrays a rustic, rough look. Many times their logos and emblems carry those same characteristics. For those photoshop lovers out there, here’s a quick and simple homemade trick to achieve the worn look and feel to your logo. For the sake of time I’m going to use HCR’s logo.
The first thing you will want to do is open your logo in photoshop obviously. Make sure your layers palette is visible by choosing ‘window > layers’ from the file menu.
Now go and find yourself a nice picture of a brushy landscape — either of trees, wheat fields, flowers, woods etc. Those types of pictures will give us the textures we are looking for. Try to pick out a picture that is similar in layout ie. landscape or portrait. Landscape it what I will use in this tutorial.
Drag the picture you chose into the logo document. You will want this on a separate layer above your logo. Next, choose from the file menu ‘image > adjustments > threshold’. Drag the slider to 50%. Your end result should look like this.
Next take your magic wand tool and make sure the tolerance is set to 10. Select the black areas in the tree layer by clicking once. Copy the selection by choosing ‘edit > copy’, then do ‘edit > paste’. This will paste a copy of the selected area above your tree layer. Turn off the tree layer by clicking the eye on the layer.
Now go to the file menu and choose ’selection > load selection’. A window will pop-up, then click OK. Those black areas should have a marquee around them. Now choose ‘edit > fill’ — Make sure White is chosen in the Contents dropdown box, then click OK. Then from the file menu choose ’select > deselect’. You should have something similar to this:
Now you we want to apply a small blur effect. Go to the file menu and choose ‘filter > blur > gaussian blur’. Enter in 0.4 and click OK. Now, from your layers palette you will see a dropdown box that most likely says ‘normal’ — click that and choose ‘overlay’. Next, choose the burn tool in the tool palette (it’s right below the gradient tool). My brush size was around 27 and the exposure was set for midtones @ 50%. Take the brush and randomly burn the edges of the logo.
Next, select the paintbrush from your tools palette. Make sure your foreground color is set to white. I used a size 13 brush in this exercise. Draw random lines within the logo as shown below.
Now go to your file menu and choose ‘filter > blur > gaussian blur’. Enter in 5.0 and click OK. Next choose ‘filter > sharpen > sharpen more’. Repeat ’sharpen more’ 3-4 more times until the brush strokes appear grainy.
One final step: Go to your layers palette, decrease the opacity on your brush strokes layer to 45-50%. That should give the logo some texture. You are finally finished — a homemade way to create your own worn graphics. Happy photoshopping!

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