This looks like a lot to do but trust me it'll take you only acouple minutes to do each time you make a texture once you've done it acouple times. 

Step 1: go to where left 4 dead is installed. it may looks something like this

C:/programs/steam/steamapps/common/left4dead/left4dead

once your there find a folder called Materials right click on it and create a shortcut of it to your desktop

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step 2: Next go to C:/programs/steam/steamapps/common/left4dead/ and find the Bin folder and right click on it and create a shortcut of it to your desktop

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 step 3: go to C:/programs/steam/steamapps/common/left4dead/ and find the SDK_content folder open it and find the materialsrc folder right click on it and create a shortcut to your desktop

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step 4: now that you have shortcuts on your desktop for these three folders your going to need to rename them.

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 rename the Materials folder to Texture folder

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 rename the Materialsrc folder to Texture maker

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and finaly rename the Bin folder to VTEX area

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Step 5: now open your photo editor weather it be photoshop or GIMP. ill be using GIMP for this tutorial since its free to download and use. to download it use this link http://www.gimp.org/downloads/

you can either create your own texture or import a picture to make a custom texture. for this i just dragged a picture into gimp 

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Step 6: all textures must be either 512x512 or 256x256 or 128x128 or any number that is 2 to the power of a number. this picture is not by defualt 512x512 so in order to make it 512x512 go to IMAGE and then down to SCALE IMAGE 

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Step 7: now you can change the size of your texture to 512x512. click the chain links to the right of the 512x512 if it keeps trying to keep the same ratio. once youve done that hit SCALE

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Step 8: when your done editing your texture, just click save as

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Step 9: once the save as window comes up, name your texture to whatever you want but the file extention MUST be .TGA 

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Step 10: once you hit save a window will come up asking if you want to use RLE compression. DO NOT use RLE compression so uncheck it and then hit Save

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Step 11: now find where you saved your texture.tga file and place into the shortcut you made earlier called Texture maker. once its in this folder create a new folder inside Texture maker called Mytextures. now place your texture inside the new Mytexture folder

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step 12: now with your mytextures folder open and with your texture in it open the VTEX area folder you made earlier. in the VTEX area folder find VTEX.exe and drag your texture and drop it on it.

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Step 13: itll bring up this window and do its thing. once its done hit any key.

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Step 14: your almost done. now go to the Texture folder you also created on your desktop earlier and theres now a new folder in it called Mytextures. your texture is it and labled as whateveryourtexturenameis.vtf as in the one i made is addicts2.vtf

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Step 15: now create a new txt document in your Mytexures folder with your texture and this will be what needs typed in it. (note! for some odd reason it wont keep the back slash in the info below so if you copy and past it make sure you add the back slash like in the picture below)

 LightmappedGeneric

{

$basetexture mytextures \ yourtexturename

$envmap env_cubemap

$surfaceprop brick

}

 the only thing you'll have to change everytime you make a texture is where i have it as addicts2 highlighted...you'll put there what ever your texture name is. you can also change where it says BRICK to another surface type is you want it to react like wood for instance.

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Step 16: now go to save as and name it yourtexturename.vmt and where it says SAVE AS TYPE change it from .txt to ALL FILES

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Step FINISHED! now in your hammer editor you can search your texture name like so

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Strid3r