Surface Lab
Give digital artwork a material surface.
Give photographs and digital artwork grain, texture, and a printed or screen-inspired finish. Combine surface and light treatments to create finished photo edits, textured covers, cohesive collages, and reusable design assets.
What you can do
Paper and print
Build paper and print character through fibers, absorption, aging, and grain, turning clean sources into tactile-looking compositions.
Screen surfaces
Create screen-like surfaces with scanlines, pixel halos, and dot patterns for retro-display graphics and electronic textures.
Texture meets light
Combine material texture with soft focus, haze, spectral splitting, and ghosting to shape both the surface and the light.
Reusable material
Export the finished treatment or separate texture and color plates to carry its surface character into a larger collage or design.
What you can make
Weathered covers and prints
Zine pages, album covers, archival-looking photographs, weathered posters, and scanned-print artwork.
Textured photography
Subtle grain and highlight softness for portraits or digital renders that feel overly clean.
Cohesive collage
Shared paper and reproduction texture across a collage made from unrelated sources.
Reusable texture plates
Texture plates and color plates for combining material treatment with other design work.
Finishing digital artwork
Add surface character and photographic softness to a clean illustration or render while keeping the main subject readable.
Texture assets for design
Export separate texture and color plates to reuse in layouts, backgrounds, and larger photographic compositions.
Project ideas
Unrelated photographs become a cohesive zine spread through a shared paper texture and worn-print finish.
A clean digital render becomes a grainy screen image, while its texture plate supplies material for a poster background.
What sets it apart
Change the surface character of an image: add photographic grain, paper, ink-like absorption, wear, or softer optics to turn a clean digital source into a designed finish.
Make separate sources feel like part of one printed piece, or build textured covers, posters, and collage assets. Export the combined result or separate plates for compositing.
Supporting capabilities
Material, display, and optical systems can be combined in one treatment; separate plates make their results useful as compositing assets.
Why use Surface Lab?
Open Surface Lab when this style of making or play feels closest to what you want.
It connects with the wider Panospace creative workflow, so results can keep evolving across compatible apps.
Inputs and exports
Supported inputs
Images
Surface Lab PAX projects
Available outputs
Custom image exports
Texture-plate PNG
Color-plate PNG
PAX projects