I don't know if this looks like bark or just rough wood or what. Your opinion (honest)would be appreciated. It only took a few steps to make and I made use of that Iced Coffee palette I snagged recently. Worked really well for this application. I made several variations and it lends itself to making seamless patterns rather easily.

Maybe you could use a bit of iwarp to make the verticals more realistic. spread some of them out a bit, just my opinion Drac
The gray one looks the best to me. I can visualize that as a tree trunk on some varieties

Hi Drac, A beautiful pattern. Unfortunately, it does not remind me of bark or wood. Too much beading and roundedness. But it has a striking resemblance to the texture that presents on gilded plaster rendered surfaces such as in fine art frames. The wooden frames were painted with a plaster mix that beaded and had strong grain in the direction of the application.These were then coloured with a matt dark colour and then a gild was applied to only to the raised plaster beads and streaks. I used to make these "fake" old gild frames in the 70's.
I have downloaded the pattern as I will use it somewhere. Thanks

I was going for something that resembled a straight grain pattern so it would definitely have to be done differently to have a 'wood' grain pattern like you see most of the time.

wbool63 - the 'beading and roundedness' most likely comes from the noise layer and the subsequent bump mapping. When I tried to do it without the noise layer I got a lot of flat areas after the bump mapping. Maybe if I selected those areas only for the noise, applied a little wind to the noise layer only, then applied a bump map it would make a difference. I'll investigate that a little further. Thanks for the honest comments. It does remind me of those old frame finishes.

Think its looking good drac.

It looks kind of like the bark on some varieties of tree but the highlights are a bit too strong.

Thanks Erisian/he4rty, but I tend to agree with wbool63. I made the changes I mentioned earlier and I like it better but it's still not exactly the look I was after. Does this look any better to you guys?

Erisian - If you like the pattern but want to change the highlights, it is easily accomplished using a curve like this.

Looking at some google images of tree bark, could maybe do with a bit more depth and possible using the noise filter and blurr add some patches of moss.

Hmmm. Moss. Plasma/Bump maybe, like you would to make some rust or corrosion only using some green tones?

I would think so.

Does this look like moss to you?

Maybe needs to be a paler green also can you displace map it to the tree bark at the moment it looks like an image on top of an image.

OK. I changed the colors and I did bump map it in the image above but I increased it here.

draconian, i think it looks just like the bark on a park shrub (sorry, botany isn't my strong point, so i've no idea what it's called) they have lots of outside my job. i like the idea of moss, but maybe the moss needs a texture too so it doesn't look painted on. i'd go for a less saturated shade of green too - maybe you can find something suitable in the attached palette?

Yeah, I'm no expert either. Thanks for the additional palette. Did you make that or DL it somewhere?

made it for a project that i never finished - so if you can use it for something that means my effort wasn't all in vain

Nice palette AnMal. Thank you.

erisian: thank you for thanking me . good thing if it gets used.

Hi Drac, Here is another method perhaps. Use the Filter/render/pattern/cml explorer until you get a pleasing "grain" . Don't worry about the reds and blues. Colour/Desaturate with luminosity. Add a white layer, render that with clouds/difference clouds. Keep it as simple or complex as you like. Use that the cloud layer to Filters /Map/displace your grain. You may want to only displace in the X direction or only in in Y direction or different amounts in x and Y (experiment). Copy the new distorted a few times .Then use colour/map to palette or gradient (eg Metallic_10) or colorize the copy and mix layer modes and opacity. Sharpen one copy or both . The main thing is to play, learn and have fun. Here are some wood samples I did today (total time about four hours, but it gets much faster as you learn a bit more about the process and that cml explorer filter)