For some time now I've considered scanning real wood samples for use in Photoshop images. Finally... here are the first 6. Who knows when or if I'll do any more but I thought to offer them for others to use without any restrictions.
I picked particularly nice samples of the six woods, sanded them to a fine smoothness with the last step being 600 grit sandpaper, and finished them with Armorall which does a fine job of bringing out the lustre of newly sanded wood without adding any discoloration or shine so often found in other finishes. Also some woods, like paduk, are a brilliant color when first worked but begin to change color from oxidation and UV rays almost immediately. Paduk changes from the brilliant orange/red to a deep, rich, brown with red/orange overtones within months when finished with almost any other product. What I used retards that process so it takes a year or two.
The samples were scanned with a flatbed scanner at 600dpi and color corrected only as much necessary to match the actual sample which was being viewed in indirect natural light. For the sake of file size, I ended up resizing the scans to 300dpi and saved them as JPEGs at the maximum setting which doesn't add compression artifacts. As a result the files are about half of a PSD or TIFF format yet, careful study of a comparison TIFF shows no difference in image quality at a magnification of 1200%.
If you should like any of the wood scan files, you can find them here...
http://homepage.mac.com/wellesgoodri...eSharing1.html
The largest one is 10.8mb but with a high speed connection will take less than 2 minutes to download as the file sharing site is on Apple servers and they have great bandwidth.
Below you'll find a sample picture of the actual wood images. Each sample is a small cropped portion of the whole image which you may download.
Cheers!
Real Wood Scans 
Linear Mode
