Organic enough?

I recall a discussion about organic things being difficult to create in PS. Well I just kinda' accidentally stumbled trying to make a background for a print brochure. I hit the wrong key combination, and applied the last filter I had used, and "Smack".....

http://mattboyslim.homestead.com/files/GreenStalk.jpg

Tell me if you think that looks organic enough. I cleaned up the image a bit to make it look more 3D-ish. I didn't take a lot of time to clean it up, but you get the general idea.

Say that looks pretty organic to me. Mind sharing what you did?

Look like lighting effects with a texture channel

I'll tell you what the technique is if I get some good comments on how it looks. Otherwise I'm not even going to say.

And no Mark, that would have been purposeful. This was accidental.

Wow! Looks really real! A little on the blurry side but very cool looking. Looks like a hair or a tiny blade of grass or something. D00d...MAKE A TUTORIAL...PLEASE??

Looks very organic to me. I really like the look. It's blurry, but you could correct that fairly easily. Organic stuff is really difficult, and I would like to see a tutorial on how you did it.

Yeah, I had to blur it up otherwise it looked too fake.

Sweet Matt.

I'm pretty sure you could sharpen a just channel (green?) and get a sharper overall image, but it looks nice like that...its kinda hypnotic if you look at it for a while.
Organics are hard to fake because: there aren't any "solid" areas of color... they are textured everywhere... and we ALL things like grass, trees, bark and leaves for granted and dont pay a whole lot of attention to them.
So I'd say you did a great job making it, and a better job noticing "Hey, that looks like..."

...but now can you apply it to anything?

Anyone can do this!

Here we go, a few simple steps:

0) Make a new layer above the BG

1) Make a new linear gradient from white to green to black

2) Drag your gradient to desired width (may take some playing)

3) Use the polygonal lasso tool to select the area where all 3 colors merge

4) Select-->Inverse

5) Delete

5.5) Select-->DeSelect

6) Filter-->Distort-->Glass (play with it a little

7) Again, use the polygonal lasso tool to remove the clutter on the outside of the shaft (heehee)

8) Use whatever tool you feel most comfortable with to add depth (Lighting effects, 3d transform (still working with this to make it look better), or, what I used, Layer Effects-->Bevel And Emboss (Soften 100%)

9) Please post back what effect you got, I want to see how others can improve upon it to make it cleaner. I'm working on it too.

Grrrrrrr.......I left the .psd file at work. Now I can't get the same effect. My new one is a lot smoother. The shaft is not so.....how do I say?.....rough.