Soulburn Studios Art Lessons

Weathering: Extracting A Dirt Pattern From A Photograph
By Neil Blevins
Created On: Nov 23rd 2013
Updated On: Oct 20th 2025
Software: Photoshop or Procreate

Beside using a Dirt Brush to paint dirt onto a texture or painting, the best way to get some dirt onto your canvas is to take a real photograph of dirt and photomanipulate it into a layer on top of your surface. This tutorial will go though several methods to do this using Photoshop and Procreate.

Select Color Range Method in Photoshop

Here's a video tutorial discussing how to extract a pattern from a photo using Select - Color Range and then use it as a mask to blend between two photos, one of dirt and one of a painted surface.

Here's some notes:

Start with your Dirt photograph

Use Select - Color Range to select only the dirt, play with fuzziness to get exactly the part you want.
Create new layer, fill the new layer with white, fill background with black
flatten image
use levels to make any final adjustments
select and copy the image
on a new canvas, have your base layer and a layer with a dirt color
on the dirt layer, create a mask. Click on mask, paste your dirt pattern
Customize your dirt pattern with any hand painting you'd like

Here's the paint surface you want to pplace the dirt ontop of:

And the dirt layer on top of the painted surface:

Channels Method in Photoshop

1) Say you have a Grayscale Image of dirt or drips...

2) Switch To The Channels Window in Photoshop

3) In a grayscale image, each channel, R G and B should be identical. So hold the Ctrl Key, and click on the red channel. You should see a selection in your main window appear.

Note: You can avoid steps 2 and 3 if you just hit Ctrl+Alt+1, which is the keyboard shortcut to select the Red Channel in CS3 and below, or Ctrl+Alt+3 for CS6.

4) Invert Your Selection (shift+ctrl+i)

5) Go to the Layers Palette, create a new Layer.

6) Select the Color Black.

7) Choose Edit, Fill and OK (alt+backspace). Hide the original layer.

8) You now have black on a transparent background. Now place this layer ontop of any other layer you want to apply your dirt. Note: You can also paste this into a layer mask if you want to use masking instead of transparency.

Quick Mask Method in Photoshop

This technique was suggested by hamish911.

1) Here's your image...

2) Select your image and copy it (ctrl+a, ctrl+c)
3) Create a New Layer (shift+ctrl+n, enter)

4) Enter Quickmask Mode (q)
5) Paste the Layer into the quickmask (ctrl+v)

6) Exit Quickmask (q)
7) Invert Your Selection (shift+ctrl+i)

8) Select the Color Black.

9) Choose Edit, Fill and OK (alt+backspace). Hide the original layer.

10) You now have black on a transparent background. Now place this layer ontop of any other layer you want to apply your dirt. Note: You can also paste this into a layer mask if you want to use masking instead of transparency.

Levels & Mask Method in Procreate

1) Start With Your Photo

2) Make the Dirt Pattern Image Black and White with Adjustments - Hue, Saturation, Brightness. Turn Saturation to 0%.

3) Give it more contrast using Adjustments - Curves, and adjust the curve in gamma mode.

4) Copy the layer by pulling 3 fingers downwards on your canvas and choose copy

5) Create a new layer. Click the layer's image and choose Fill Layer. Fill it with a brown color. Note: You can also just use a pre-existing layer that has a generally dirty looking color.

6) Click the layer's image and choose Mask.

7) Make sure the mask is selected in the layers dropdown (it should be the brighter blue color)

8) paste by pulling 3 fingers downwards on your canvas and choose paste.

9) The dirt pattern is now pasted in the mask. You can now place the layer and its associated mask ontop of any other painted layer you want.

Final note, if you want to have a layer with only transparency, and no mask, just select the layer (not the mask) and click on the image in the layer dropdown and choose "Merge Mask".