Brushed Metal Effect in Photoshop
January 4, 2010
Here is the texture we will be creating, it’s quite a cool effect but even if you don’t require the specific end result the techniques that get you there are definitely worth having in the toolbox 
1) Start with a canvas that will easily envelope the object you want to add the metal texture to, and also to begin with make the canvas wider than it is tall. For this example I started with a canvas size of 360 x 300 pixels.
(the reason for making it wider is that we will be doing a motion blur which leaves and undesirable effect at the left and right of the canvas, so we make it bigger initially so we can crop it to an exact square later to chop of the unwanted pixels).
Fill the canvas with a medium (50%) grey, and add noise (Filter > Noise > Add Noise) and go with about 40% and uniform distribution:
2) Now add a motion blur (Filter > Blur > Motion Blur) of about 70 pixels at an angle of 0°:
3) Next, crop the canvas to be an exact square (in this case 300 x 300) hence chopping off the dregs of the motion blur.
4) Now we are going to add highlights to the metal, which we are going to do with strips of grey the same colour as we used in step 1 (50% grey) and use layer styles to do the work…
First, on a new layer create 3 strips with the marquee tool, the ones at the left and right a similar combined width of the one in the middle, then fill with 50% grey:
Set this layer style to screen and create three more strips in another new layer, create these new ones in the middle of the one in the middle and the edges of the side ones from the previous layer:
And also set this layer to screen.
Something we are trying to do here is make the highlights at the far left and right bright enough to pretty much cover up the underlying texture… This is because in a later step we will be wrapping the texture round and the left and right edges will actually meet each other and by having nice bright highlights the join will effectively be seamless
5) Now we are going to create the shadow layers, follow the exact same procedure as the highlights in step 4 except this time use multiply instead of screen:
Once you are done creating two shadow layers you should have this:
6) Next, we need to blur all four of these highlight and shadow layers, choose one of the layers and gaussian blur (Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur) it by about 6 pixels. You can now click the other 3 shadow/highlight layers and press cmd+f on Mac or ctrl+f on PC to do the same filter to each layer… You should now have something like this:
7) This is now the bread and butter of the technique… choose Filter > Distort > Polar Coordinates to see the fruits of your labour:
and thats it 
You can now clip this with any shape you want (hold the alt key and click the line between the two layers you want to clip together in the layers palette) and add further effects as required…
Enjoy
Simply great work and help for others. Good job