In preparation, this photo has already been cropped (to a 6x6 inch square format, at 300 dpi) and converted to black and white. It's important, I think, to begin with a good b&w. There are a lot of ways to convert a color image to black and white but I get the best results with a technique created by Greg Gorman (PDF, html).

The image you choose for this tutorial should not be mostly black as the texture (as described in this tutorial) doesn't show up on black. Other than that, there are no requirements. There is, however, a suggestion: save your image in a format that will preserve its quality. As a rule, you should never save working files in JPEG format. Every time you save your image as a JPEG it loses image quality. You can save your working file(s) in Photoshop (psd) format but I prefer to save them as TIFF files with no compression.

Note: This is part of a Photoshop tutorial intended to be viewed as a set.