Creating MARPAT digital camouflage textures with Photoshop

Fireteams.net was in need of a camouflage texture. After a couple hours of scouring the web searching for a decent MARPAT (MARine PATtern) image, I gave up and decided to make my own.  I put together this little photoshop tutorial showing the techniques I used to create a Digital Desert Camouflage texture.

Just a warning: I'm a programmer, not an artist.  Also, my photoshop abilities are the result of following tutorials on the internet. If you know of better or easier ways to accomplish the same thing, I would love to hear about it in the comments!

Here is the final MARPAT camouflage image we'll be creating:

MARPAT Digital Desert Camouflage

We'll start our tutorial by taking a quick look at real desert MARPAT camouflage.  This will give us a better idea of the look we want to achieve in our final image.

Sample of real desert MARPAT camouflage.
Courtesy of http://www.helloelastic2.co.uk/justlooking/

It's easy to see that there are some unique characteristics that define MARPAT:

Color

• For Desert MARPAT, there are four colors which are used in the image.
• Colors are layered with lighter colors underneath darker ones.
• Blobs become smaller and less connected as they get darker.
• In digital desert camouflage, each color is a different shade of brown.

Shape

• Every blob-like shape in this image is composed of small square shapes. 
• Blobs tend to look stretched, flowing in more of a horizontal direction.
• Blobs are randomly shaped and have many holes in them.

Now that we have some background on what we want to achieve, let's get started with our tutorial!


1) Begin by selecting four colors to use with your image. You can place each color into a swatch or paint them into a layer for easy access.  Here are the four colors I chose to use:

Base Color:	#d7cebd
Light Color:	#c1b59c
Medium Color:	#a99265
Dark Color:	#88602b

2) Make a new layer and paint it black. Apply a "Difference Clouds" filter on this layer:

Filter > Render > Difference Clouds

This will create a nice spread of light and dark shades which will help us to create our blob shapes later on.

Difference Clouds!

3) Increase the contrast of the clouds.  This can be done through the following menu option:

Image > Adjustments > Brightness / Contrast

Increase the contrast to a value between 75 and 100.  I used a value of 90 for each of my cloud layers.

4) Apply a mosaic filter to the clouds:

Filter > Pixelate > Mosaic

Select a small cell size, I chose a size of 5.  Sizes of 7-8 will produce images that look more zoomed in.  The cell size will represent the smallest "square" that will be in the image.  I encourage playing around with this value until you find the size you desire.

5) Repeat steps 2 through 4 two more times. This will give us a total of three layers of pixelated difference clouds.  The variability found in each cloud layer will help prevent our blobs from having too similar of patterns.


6) Now that we have our clouds, it is time to start creating our camouflage!  We'll start with the lightest color first: the Base color.  Make a new layer and use the paint bucket tool to color the layer with our Base color. That's it! (at least for this layer).  I wish the other layers were this easy though...

7) Before we continue, I would like to quickly explain what we are going to try and accomplish here.  Using the Magic Wand Tool, we're going to select multiple areas of a cloud layer (by holding the Shift key while selecting with the wand), then fill-in our selection with one of our three remaining colors. If while clicking around you accidently let go of shift (and lose all of your selections), just hit ctrl-z to get all your work back. We will use a different cloud image for each of our colors.

Select the Magic Wand Tool (W is the keyboard shortcut) and choose a very small Tolerance. I chose a value of 2. You can play around with larger values, but I recommend no larger than 4. For this layer we're going to create the Light color portion of the camo. This color should cover about 75% of the base color, and should contain large, connected blobs.  Here are a couple images of my selections in progress. This will give you a good idea on how to progress.

Result after a few shift-clicks

Final selection. Takes a while, but I swear it is worth it!

8) Now that we have our selection, copy (Ctrl-C) and paste (Ctrl-V) your selection into a new layer.  Set a color overlay on this layer to the color you chose for your Light color.  This can be done through:

Layer > Layer Style > Color Overlay

Make sure that Blend Mode is set to Normal, and Opacity to 100%.  Click on the colored icon, and set it to your color.  This is only one of many ways to set the color for our selection. I like this method as it makes it very easy to change the color of the entire layer at once (especially handy if you want to change the color later).

Result after a copy and paste.  I moved the Base layer

above the clouds so that we can actually see the selection.

Result after setting the blending options. Finally starting

to look like camouflage.

9) Repeat steps 7-9 for our next two colors, using a different cloud layer for each color. Remember that these blobs get smaller and less connected as they get darker. Below are the results for my next two colors:

Selection mask for Medium color.

Result after applying medium color layer.

Dark color selection mask.

Final camouflage image

That is all there is to it! This technique can be done on a larger scale to produce nice backgrounds or textures in games. If this tutorial was useful to you, or you found better techniques or easier ways to accomplish things, please let me know in the comments!

Hope you found this useful!