In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to create a realistic electric guitar using only Photoshop. I hope you will learn a lot of techniques that can help you create complex photorealistic compositions.

This tutorial is quite extensive and might take you a few hours to complete.

Preview of Final Results

Step 1: Draw the Guitar’s Headstock

Create a new document with the following dimensions: 2,048×3,072px. Unlock the default white background by double-clicking on it in the Layers Panel, then rename it to “Bg”.

Let’s create the basic shape of the headstock of our guitar. Select the Pen Tool (P) and make sure to set it up in the Options Bar as shown below. Afterwards, draw the shape as you see it below.

Next, create a new layer, choose the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) and then draw a rectangle with the size of 417×287px.

Then, change your Foreground color to #966a39 and Background color to #cdac85.

Go to Filter > Render > Clouds and the layer will then be automatically filled with the filter.

Let’s use another filter: Go to Filter > Render > Fibers.

Use the following settings for the Fibers filter:

• Variance: 6
• Strength: 4

You will be able to achieve this result, which will be used as a surface texture later on:

Let’s rotate the texture a little bit by first pressing Ctrl/Cmd + T to activate Free Transform (or you can just go to Edit > Free Transform, which achieves the same thing).

Rotate the texture as shown below:

Now that we have the texture layer and headstock shape, let’s merge both of them. Create a selection around the headstock shape by Ctrl-clicking/Cmd-clicking on the layer’s thumbnail in the Layers Panel.

Then click on the texture layer to make sure it’s the active layer. Next, go to Layer > Layer Mask > Reveal Selection.

The layer mask will hide all parts of the texture layer that are outside of the selection, resulting in the following:

Convert the texture layer for Smart Filters by going to Filter > Convert for Smart Filters. This will make sure that our filters our non-destructive, preserving our original layer data.

We need more texturing to really achieve a photorealistic look, so go to Filter > Add Noise and use the settings shown below.

Next, let’s give the headstock an Inner Shadow and a Gradient Overlay layer style in order to reinforce the realism of it.

Inner Shadow

Gradient Overlay

You will have this result:

Step 2: Give the Headstock Some Depth

Place a selection around the headstock, then move the selection as shown below.

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