The gritty design for poster printing is one of the basic and perhaps slightly popular method for many casual or novice designers. It is basically a first step before using more intricate techniques for bigger designs for tasks such as large poster printing. If you want to know how to make your poster images look gritty and textured, here are the ten steps on making your poster printing designs look gritty. In this tutorial, we will be using Adobe Photoshop as the application of choice.

1. First of course, fire up Photoshop and open up the poster image that you want to look textured or gritty. For this procedure it might be best to use the original high resolution image or photograph so that your other poster elements won't be affected. Just leave your poster design for now, and just focus on the image. You can insert the gritty design later once you are done.

2. Now, on the menu bar on top, look for the "Image" option. Click on it once to get a drop down menu.

3. Afterwards, click on the option "Image". You should see another menu appear. Look for the "Adjustments" option, and then click on the "Curves" option.

4. A dialog window should appear with a graph. Manipulate the graph by moving the two movable points making the line of the graph look like an "S" on its side. This should increase the difference between light and dark spots of the image by adjusting the contrast. Close the window once you are done. Try to check if the adjustment looks good, and alter it again if need be. 5. Next, click on the "Filter" menu on the menu bar on top and click on the "Render" option. In the menu that appears look for the "Lighting effects" item and click on it once.

6. A dialog window should then appear. In this window you can adjust an area of the image where the image is the lightest. Go for a spotlight effect in this dialog window and move the lighted area via its angles so that you light up the central object of your photograph or image. Close the window up once you are done. Just check again if the effect looks right, and edit it if changes are needed.

7. Now, for the texture. You can try to use the other filter effects on your Photoshop for this. Filter features like posterize can be very useful. Just go to the filters menu and browse for certain effects that you may want to apply. You should see a preview of your image in the dialog window when you do this. Just choose the one that makes your poster image look gritty and apply it.

8. Also, as an alternative, you can also download a custom texture over the Internet. Simply search for the texture that you may want that can add to the grittiness of your poster. Textures like sand, gravel and rust should be perfect for that gritty effect. Once you download this. Just place it on your image and set the Photoshop blending options to "overlay". This should integrate the texture layer over your poster image.

9. Afterwards, you should more or less have a nice gritty image to work with. You can still play with the color options and the brightness contrast options if you want to add in a more surreal effect to your poster image.

10. Finally, just insert your new gritty poster image into your original poster design. Viola! A nice gritty image for your poster.