Google for "Wood worshop", its free app for creating wood textures. D/L it and play a little, you can create realistic wood in no time :)

Create washed look, it will look much more realistic than highly saturated color ;)

When I creating textures, I folow my instict and experiment. So there is no linear recipe :)

Few tips, add clouds on separate layer and set it to Overlay or some other blend mode that will burn it into layer below. Play with Lighting Effects and alpha channels. In short experiment allot ;)

Hope some of this will help you :)

Tihomir

Open your mind and share the knowledge!