Photoshop Tutorials: Create A Portrait Studio Background

Step 4: Apply The "Clouds" Filter To The New Layer

With the new layer selected in the Layers palette (the currently selected layer is highlighted in blue), go up to the Filter menu at the top of the screen, choose Render, and then choose Clouds. I don't think you'll find too many people who'll claim that Photoshop's Clouds filter gives you anything remotely close to realistic-looking clouds, but still, your document should now look something like this:

The Clouds filter gives you something different each time you apply it, so if you want to experiment with it a little to see different variations of the effect, simply press Ctrl+F (Win) / Command+F several times to re-apply the filter and you'll see a different cloud pattern each time.

Before we continue, just to show you what I meant earlier about how the Clouds filter would give us a different result if we tried running in at 300 pixels/inch instead of 72 pixels/inch, here's what we'd get with it at 300 pixels/inch:

That's a few too many clouds for what we need here, which is why we're running it at a low resolution value.

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Step 5: Lower The Opacity Of The Clouds Layer To 40%

We've added our clouds but they're too intense at the moment. We need them to be much more subtle, so go to the Opacity option in the top right corner of the Layers palette and lower the layer's opacity down to 40%:

Step 6: Merge The Layers

We need to merge our two layers together at this point, and we can do that with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+E (Win) / Command+E (Mac). If we look again in our Layers palette, we can see that two layers have been merged into one:

Step 7: Apply The "Spatter" Brush Filter

Let's make the background look a bit more interesting by adding a little texture to it. Going up to the Filter menu once again, this time choose Brush Strokes, and then choose Spatter. When the dialog box appears, enter 10 for the Spray Radius and 5 for the Smoothness, then click OK to apply the filter to the image:

This gives the background a bit of a "painted" look to it:

Step 8: Fade The Filter Effect's Opacity To 50%

Before you click anywhere else in Photoshop, go up to the Edit menu at the top of the screen and choose Fade Spatter. The "Fade" option is only available as the very next thing you do after applying a filter, so if you click somewhere else first and then try and select the Fade option, it will be grayed out and unavailable. When the Fade dialog box appears, lower the opacity value of the filter effect to 50% to reduce the intensity of the effect: