Creating a grunge look

[dmstraker]

Here's a grunged image.

And here's how to do it.

Start with the basic image:

Duplicate the background layer twice.

On the top layer, add a mild Gaussian Blur filter layer as a nested layer (I used 1.2px).

Then change the top pixel layer's blend mode to Difference.

Now  add layers above the top pixel layer, so it affects all below.

The Difference'd blend will be very dark, so to see lines, add an Invert adjustment.

The lines here are rather feint, so make them visible by adding a Threshold layer and crank the slider very high. I used 98%.

This is really noisy, so let's do a bit of smoothing. Add a Denoise filter layer, click the 'extreme' box on the Luminance Denoise slider and move it up high. I went as far as 1513%.

Now select all layers except the bottom (original image) layer and make them a group (Ctrl-G).

Finally, change the blend mode of the group to Overlay to get the final grunge image above.

The final layer stack looks like this:

Feel free, of course, to play with layers on/off, variables, opacity, etc.