If you liked how easy it was to make granite, then you'll love turning it into marble even more. Technically, this shouldn't even be a separate tutorial, more of an addendum to the first granite texture lesson. Because the length of this tutorial is so short, I normally wouldn't include screenshots, but because it looks so cool I included them anyway. To finish this tutorial you'll need the finished granite tile that you made from the "Creating Granite Textures (Part 1)" lesson, shown here.

    Alright, down to business. In photoshop, make a new 256 pixel wide by 256 high canvas, and hit the "D" button to default to black and white colors. Now go to your Filtermenu and select Render > Clouds, then go back to Filter > Render and choose Difference Clouds. Repeat the Difference Clouds filter ("CTRL + F") a few times until you get a nice "lightning" pattern similar to this.

    Next we're going to really tighten the contrast, so go to the Image > Adjust > Brightness / Contrast tool, set the contrast to somewhere around +90, and the brightness to -35. The image should now look close to the example here.

    Select the image and copy it (press "CTRL + A", then "CTRL + C"), then open up the granite tile from the first granite tutorial, and paste the black and white cloud image onto the texture. Now adjust the layer blending options; set the blending filter to "lighten" and the opacity to about 25%. This will remove the black from the layer and give your granite some natural-looking crevices. If you're going for more realism, use the sharpen tool to roughen the edges of the layer and blend in with the noisy granite pattern below. For best results, repeat the steps in the previous paragraphs to make multiple layers with different patterns...it will give your tile some variety and more natural appeal. When you're done, you'll wind up with something close to this.

    That's it! And for those of you who want to see it applied to the Matrix texture from the last lesson, take a look. Pretty easy huh? Just like the first granite tutorial, you don't have to limit this example to just floor and wall tiles. This will work on a lot of stone surfaces, and even more valuable is the fact that the pattern will tile (given you've adjusted the granite pattern below to tile as well). I hope everyone gets some good use out of this one.

Questions or comments? E-mail Mr. Lake