Making Pretty Seamless Patterns from Photos in Photoshop

1. Skillshare Intro: Pretty Patterns in Photoshop: Hey everyone, welcome to pretty patterns in Photoshop. This class is all about creating patterns from photos. There are a lot of amazing classes on creating patterns in programs like Procreate on the iPad and also painting patterns. But I am a photographer and I wanted to make patterns in Photoshop. And I'm also a very, very, very excited floral enthusiast. I love to grow flowers. And so all of the patterns that I make are from flowers and grasses and leaves that I grow in my garden. So this class is all about taking those things that you might have around you a bouquet of flowers. You're given something growing in your yard, bringing it inside and then photographing it, cutting it out and turning into repeat patterns. Now, I don't make just repeat patterns. Sometimes I do standalone things for things like scarves or wall art as well. Let's dive in to what you will learn in this class. These are a few examples of the patterns that I make, and they have a lot of different variety. This is the basic kind where it's sort of a tossed pattern. We do have some that are more minimal. Hear my daughter requested a very minimal pattern for a duvet cover that she wanted from very simple to really complex. We're going to cover it all. I wanted to introduce myself. I'm Caroline. I am a long time photographer. I am currently as Sony artists and of imagery. And I love to make photos, but like I said, flowers or my passion. So here's what we're going to cover in this course. I'm gonna show you how I set up my small home studio. And when I say small, you're going to see how teeny-tiny my studio is. It's literally a countertop in our back entry way. It's nothing complicated, but I'll show you exactly how I do everything. I'm gonna show you some of the tips and tricks that I have for creating composites, which is what we're doing. We're making composites when we make patterns. And sometimes the shooting process is the most important. There's some little idiosyncrasies about Photoshop that may cutting things out easier or harder. And so we're gonna go over that. What I do is I create a bank of images and then later on I started to compile them. So right now when I'm recording this, it's in the wintertime and I'm currently going through all of my summer images and creating patterns from those. So it's a year long process where I just shoot like crazy, awesome or long and then bank it for a later date when I have time to work on the compositing. We're gonna talk about cutting things out. Now, things have gotten much more simple. It's for cutting things out in photoshop and we're gonna go over some of the problems that arise when you're cutting out complicated things like flowers. And some of my little tricks and tips for dealing with things that just don't want to cut out. Okay? I mean, seriously, if you're cutting out a cosmos and it has a million tiny little feathers and it's not working. I have ways of smudging it and making it work. Even though it's not technically perfect. I'll go into that. We're going to learn how to use Pattern Preview in Photoshop, which is the big thing for visualizing how you're making your pattern. It's super helpful and we'll use it constantly in this course. We're going to learn how to use pattern fill command in two different ways to create more complicated patterns. And then sometimes we can use other filters like the offset filter in Photoshop for creating a more simple pattern. And this can be translated to something like GIMP or other Photoshop like programs that may not have Pattern Preview, so we'll cover that as well. Now, photoshop on its own is great, but there are plugins for Photoshop that can make pattern-making even easier. We're going to talk about things like Topaz impression exposure, snap art, and an iPad app called Eichler AMA, which is also on the iPhone. And I sometimes export or AirDrop images over to my iPad to do some work on that program and then send it back to Photoshop. To finish, we're going to work on several different types of patterns from start to finish, but you don't necessarily have to make the exact same patterns that I'm making. You can use any flower that you happen to have. I want to make that abundantly clear. You do not need to have the exact anything that I'm doing and you just need something similar. If you have a bouquet of roses and around Valentine's Day, use those if you have dried flowers, use those. If you have fake flowers. If you go to somewhere like Michaels or Hobby Lobby and you have some silk flowers, you can absolutely use those. It really isn't about this particular plant or even object. You can go ahead and use whatever you have that you can cut out. And then I have several videos that I walk you through some of the problems and solutions because It's deceptively simple. It looks like this would be easy, but there's a lot of little things that can get in the way and make the process kind of frustrating. So I'm going to break down some of those things like what happens when you have a faulty repeat or edge meet up issues and how to have a painterly effect that is seamless, which is to be tricky. We're gonna go all over that and I am super excited to dive in with you. So let's get started. 2. My Tiny Studio: Hey everyone. I wanted to talk about my shooting setup, my studio, if you will. And really all it is is a traditional countertop. It is a countertop depth counter. Nothing special. This isn't my back porch. I just have storage cabinets underneath for things like dog food and a blender, that kind of thing. So it's very normal. The thing that makes it quite beneficial is the fact that it has a wall right behind it with some windows. These have plastic on them in the back because we're waiting for the storm windows to come in. They do have glass on the other side, but they're not very insulated since it's a super old house anyway. Just emphasizing the fact that this is a very normal working situation. I like it because I can prop up my surfaces against this wall and lay another surface down and I can interchange these things. The big thing that I want to convey here is that it doesn't cost a lot of money to or you don't need a dedicated space necessarily. This could be your kitchen countertop, it could be a table. But just know that if you're going to be propping up backdrops, it's helpful to have something for them to lean on. This works great, but it could be in your basement, it could be anywhere. The biggest and most important investment in this whole thing is lighting. I do have some significant investment in the lighting here, although I've been using it for about, let's see, five years now. So it's really paid for itself over and over again. You can find those here. At Wescott lighting. Isn't the only brand that has mats that are LED. There are other ones out there, but these are the ones that I personally have been using for many years, at least since 2017, maybe before 2015, I think I had my smaller one, possibly. It is the cinematic system or the city lighting system. So I don't really use all the other stuff that's meant for movies. I like the flex mats because I can have duct taped them to the wall. They're lightweight and flexible as you can see. I use those for lighting. They are fairly expensive and so that might be a factor for you. But again, there are other brands that are, The more, I guess you'd call them the knockoff brands, that are a little cheaper. It just depends on how much you want to invest in it. But I find that the daylight balance on them, it just feels extremely like natural light. And my initial reason for investing in them was because I wanted a fake window. You can see that in my Lightroom here. This is my two foot by two foot PMAT, which was the more expensive investment. And I have literally taken this thing everywhere. I've taken it to conferences. I photograph people with it all the time and I have it propped up against a wall like, just like this in the studio situation where it mimics a window and natural light window. Now you can also use a reflector on the other side. You can invest in the light. It could also could be a strobe if you're comfortable with that. I like natural light only because it's not natural light, but it continuous light because I can just flick it on and I flip it to a 100% and then I just started shooting. I don't have to think about settings. I don't have to put a thing on my camera. Trigger. It just it's super, super fast. And what I do is I literally come in the backdoor that's over here. Come in with my specimen, stick it into the third hand tool or the flower frog, and then just start shooting. This setup here for this more than blush rose is a little bit more entailed. I have another flex mat which is a one-by-one, which quite often that's the only one I use. If you can get a one foot by one foot LED Matt or a one foot by one foot LED panel that may work for you as well. This one has a clamp and this case I have it propped up on a box against a crystal vase. But it also has a clamp option that I can clamp onto something if I feel like it, but this works fine. I think I have the clamp option on it right now because I can move the vase around. It literally is clamped to the vase. Not high-tech here. You could definitely come up with something more refined. Then I have some spent flowers over here where I store my cutting shears and a string. This is the third hand tool that I use quite often in my pictures. There's pollen on the tabletop. Those are the elements for lighting. And then the third hand tool and a flower frog are my main ways of holding the subject. This is a really nice Japanese one that I bought. I think it was about $30. It has a rubber like rubber bumper around it. And what this does is when you put it down into water like you're making an arrangement, it just keeps it from slipping around, which is nice, and it also comes apart. This is two pieces. So if I wanted to make a real arrangement, I could frankly, I only need like one little part of this because I'm usually sticking in just a couple of stems at a time. I tried to keep it pretty simple. I'd rather do one step at a time and then combine them later in Photoshop to make an arrangement than to do five or six stems together and then be locked into that position. That's kind of the way I work. As far as the backdrops go. I get those from ikea. And the ones that I use are there white and black tabletops and their desk size, so they're not very big. I don't know if this is probably a bigger one, but the desktops are, I think Lindeman, Lindemann. There's just no I in the middle. Lindeman 2nds are the ones that I use. I think I have this black one and I have a straight-up white one. They also have been a blue and gray. They're very heavy. These are bigger, so I probably wouldn't go with those. I go with a $29.55 inch versions. That's still might be kind of big. They may have smaller ones. Do they have sort by size? But these are the ones that I use. But these are, these are large. They might have smaller desktop versions. You can just look there. If you go to an actual ikea store, you can take a peek at them and that's where I got mine. Also, their shelving is another possibility to you don't have to use that. Another company that I use is replica surfaces. And they're a little bit more expensive. So for a tabletop, it's $30 for this. And then replica surf, oops. We'll just bring this up. Replica surfaces is another one that I like to use and I do use these little surface connectors that she has used to be medium back in the day. And their photographic surfaces that are nice and they don't absorb water and they're thin and lightweight. They've got lots of them, but they tend to be kind of expensive. They're worth it if you're gonna be using them a lot, but I tend to just stick to black and white. The reason I do that is because I'm not actually photographing the background. This is just to make cutting out easier. In fact, sometimes the grain impression that is on the surface of the black one gets in the way sometimes because it reflects light and not uniform way. And so sometimes when I'm doing cutouts and perhaps like selecting a background color to eliminate it. To do the cut-out. Doesn't always work the best. Just straight black and white works better for me. If you can find a small chroma key, green or blue background, that would be awesome as well. I don't have a way to put a giant one which is like five foot by seven foot. If this was a table and I could put it behind it and prop it up against a table that would be really slick as well. Anything that is different from your subject is going to work. So white, fur, darker subjects, black for lighter subjects. And then if you want a green screen, chroma key is what that's called. You could go ahead and try that as well. The key with cutting things out I've found is to just practice on multiple surfaces and then see which one works better. One of the things that I find problematic in here, if I can maybe scroll to the next scene, I tried to do pullbacks frequently. Something like this. The white background is going to work much better because it open here. I've got the flex Matt propped against empty wine box. And I use that as fill light. But in this case the white background helps to everything else to pop and that makes it easier to cut it out. You can just get an idea of the lighting here that I'm working with and the dust spots, that's frequent issue, you can see that they're keeping it real. I'm dust spots are real. This is just propped up on the third hand tool. This is a piece of foam core. That's another option you can use. The other thing that I use a lot are ceiling tiles. So a PVC ceiling tiles. So, you know, like those drop ceilings you see in banks and offices, they have if you redo a roof or somebody redoes This, sorry, the ceiling. Plastic PVC ceiling tiles work great as well. Lightweight, impervious to water, that kind of thing. But the trouble is when you start to use a backdrop that is To close to your subjects color or the fact that your subject might be translucent. Whatever color in the background is coming through, is going to come through your petals. You want to be really careful with that. One of the things that does not work is shooting in Situ. When you have something like this, this is a gray fence in my yard and this is impossible to cut out. And it's because the colors that are in this fence actually do relate very closely to the colors in this comatose and it is a pain in the butt. Almost impossible to cut it out. So that's why I cut things and take them in and do that versus a shooting all the time in situ. There are times when it works great. To just do it in nature like daylilies for instance. Their flowers are nice and big. And because of that, they're easy shapes for the computer program to see. That's a bad picture. It's not very, not very good, very bright light. But when you get to things that are very intricate like this, definitely having it against a white backdrop is super helpful. And also make sure that your subject has none of the color in the background. So if you have any white et al in your flower, makes sure that you're cutting it out against a black or darker background. And you can see by the variety of lighting here, I don't necessarily overly light them. And sometimes underexposing because that helps the background to be much different than the flower itself. It also helps sometimes to light the background separately. You can go in and shoot a light right at the background, which will help blow the background out and make it easier to detect your subject. But like something like this is super easy to cut out. You can see my third hand tool. The computer program has no problem. Photoshop has no problem cutting out something like that. See here where I wanted to see if there's any other setups. I don't often use the black background unless I'm shooting white flowers and I do have some white flowers that I was shooting, the amazing grade poppies. Let me just scroll here. This is one problem I should say. I have the hardest time with this and finally gave up doing white flowers on a white or gray background is really hard. The computer just has the hardest time cutting it out. It would be much better on a black background. I had to kind of bag all of these and I'm waiting for a new flush of Shasta daisies to go ahead and do it again because this one was impossible. It didn't not like it at all. And you can see why white on white. When I had this white lily, I went ahead and used the black background. And I knew that I was going to cut off the flower frog at the bottom, so I wasn't too concerned about having block there, but this made it really easy to cut out. The green was a little tricky. But you'll see in my video was for cutting things out, that you can use multiple tools and sometimes you have to use almost every tool they have in their arsenal to cut things out effectively or going to try and do it again. If you feel like I want to spend a million years cutting something else, so if it's not working, I just don't I just figure I'll do it a different way. One of the things that I had to do was I was having the hardest time cutting out holly hawks. And they just were not cutting out. The background was busy, everything wasn't working. So what I did, instead of bringing it into the studio, I had my husband helped me in grabbing an extra set of hands are having some foam core on a backdrop stand or something like that. Like one of those little punchy backdrop stands there. They're used for things like savage pop-up backdrops. They are pretty inexpensive. Wescott has those as well. But I just had my husband hold the piece of foam core behind whatever it is I was photographing and that made it a little bit easier. But if there's something that you just can't cut off and there's too big for your studio that having a chunk of white something to bring outside you even a white sheet would work fine. Just something that is sort of matte finish and light-colored is usually best. Again, things like daylilies, I always shoot them in Situ just because they're very easy to cut out. Then here are my amazing gray poppies I mentioned before. I'm shooting those against a black backdrop makes the shape really defined. Although these little stems are a bugger and you just, I just ended up cutting off all the little hairs and going with just a straight stem. But anyway, that is my general studio setup and sometimes I hold them. Here's another poll back. I just wanted you to get an idea of where I'm working. This is just a one light situation. I don't have this one on the big two-by-two, Matt and I was just using the one foot by one foot mat. This is the vase that I have it clipped to. And I can shift up and down and then I have coming at a 45-degree angle. So my subject here is propped up on a box. And then I just move the light back and forward closer to it, closer to it, farther away, shift it to the side and more to a 45 degree angle until I feel like the petals are receiving the light in the way that I want to photograph and then I meet her on it. And that's another thing is that you're working really fast. A lot of times these things will wilt. Some of them really, really quickly. And that's what I do is photograph things that wouldn't necessarily make great cut flowers because they do work really fast. Because of that, I just find continuous lighting to be better in this situation. That's my little setup. I hope that let me know if you have any questions. This is not rocket science or anything and it's really small. It's basically a tabletop setup. But just think about the kind of lighting you want. There are a lot of different things on, say, Amazon for product photography, where you can make things that have no background to speak of a no shadows and that may work for some people have a shadow list box for shooting they use for watches and shoes and any product photography on Amazon, pretty much. They're pretty inexpensive. That would be a possible option. But again, higher is better. I've heard that the lower cheaper ones can have weird color casts and the lighting can be inconsistent and different things. But anyway, that is where I will leave you. Let me know if you have any questions. 3. Shooting Tips Lenses and Aperture: When you are working with the pattern creation process, it's important to consider what kind of camera and lens you're using. Now the biggest concern for me when it comes to cutting out elements for patterns is to make sure that I have enough detail. If you have very shallow depth of field that will show in your cutouts, it will make cutting out things a little bit more difficult because you'll have those fuzzy edges. And also if you go to translate your photo images into more stylized effects in say, eye color, Rama, or snap arch or Topaz impression or any of the number of plugins that you can use in Photoshop. Having deeper depth of field is very helpful. Let's talk a little bit about lenses and focal lengths and all of that. So when I am shooting this, I tend to use a couple of different lenses. The first one I like is the one I have here, which is a 90 millimeter macro lens. And I often shoot it at F6, 0.3 or deeper Aperture, F8, F6. If I can, I try to go as deep as I possibly can so that I get the most of the subject that I can in focus, I use a lot of different lenses. In this case, I use the 90 millimeter macro extensively. Here. Another one that I like to use is a 50 millimeter. I have Sony's 50 millimeter G master 1.2, which I will shoot at F11 or F4, F6. You don't really need a super expensive, expensive lens because we are shooting deeper. And so having the light sources actually the better choice, making sure that you have enough light and then stopping down your lens. The reason that it's really important is when you start to get with images like this, where you have the petals are curling out toward the viewer. The deeper depth of field is really important because you're either going to get these tips of the petals and focus or the interior, but you're not going to get both unless you stop down. In this case, I went to F 11. Another lens that I really like to use is the 35-millimeter. In this case, it's the Sony GMAT or 35 millimeter, again at F11. That seems like a nice sweet spot for me. I tried to go deeper or sometimes but dust spots will show up on your camera and you can end up spending a lot of time getting desk spots off of the face of your flowers or your objects. So just keep that in mind. One thing I like to do when I'm shooting outdoors, especially things that don't travel well into the studio or that don't have I don't have enough room in the studio. I will bring a foam core board out to the garden and provided the light is strong enough that I can have a fairly deep depth of field. I will go ahead and do that. In this case, I only was able to get F4. It was overcast and cloudy. It would be nice to have an off-camera flash situation or augment the lighting somehow, but you just do the best you can. So carrying a foam core piece or a small backdrop out into the garden is really helpful. This is more difficult because this will cast a shadow. It's harder to set up. Well, you often have wind and other things to contend with. But this is a method that I use frequently and that is the resulting image before I cut it out. And I think there's a doodle on this particular foam core board which has no problem. But then I go ahead and cut it out as you will see in later videos. But again, stopping down is really important in it. I'm not able to do as good a job with a foam core background job outdoors as I am in Studio 355090. Highlight source, deep depth of field, meaning a stopped on aperture for this project. Okay, thanks everyone. 4. Intro to Tools and Shortcuts: In this video, I wanted to talk a little bit about the components that you will be using when you make patterns. If you are a photo editor, it's likely that these components are things that you have not probably used before. They're easy to find. It's not complicated and if you're at all familiar with layers and all of that, it should be pretty easy. The first thing that we want to do is working as show how to work with a new document. In this case, I've opened a new document which is, I believe 7 thousand by 7 thousand pixels with a transparent background. If you want it for want to make a new document, you simply go up to File New and then there'll be a window that pops up. Yours likely won't have as many options as I have here. Because if you're not making custom sizes, you'll just have the default ones at Photoshop suggests for you. But you can always come over here, put in your width and height for pixels, the resolution, I always recommend 150 to 300 depending on how large it is. When I'm making really, really large patterns like 14 thousand by 14 thousand pixels, I'll use 150. And if I'm using, making smaller ones, like 2 thousand, I'll make sure I keep it at 300. It's really not that big of a deal. Because a lot of printing houses have different requirements. For instance, if you're printing your fabric, It's Spoonflower, they suggest 150. But if you're using some print on-demand places, they recommend 300. Oftentimes they will let you know if your resolution is not matching up to what they need. Because patterns tile, you always have the option of tiling your pattern on a bigger surface. Should you need it for a print-on-demand project or something similar. But then you just hit Okay, and then it will create it. But we're going to close because I already have one open here. The next thing that you're going to want to look at, and I don't use it very often and you won't see me use it in the videos because I tend to use Edit, Define, Pattern, all my steps. But one thing you can't open it and it can be handy is to go to Window and go down to patterns. Now the patterns function here is a spot where all your patterns can go. And when you're working with Pattern Preview, you can hit this plus button and it will add the pattern to it. Now you'll see lots and lots of patterns in here because those are also accessible through the way that I do. For instance, here's a pattern that I created yesterday. Now, if you want to park this over on your menu, you can park it there and then you can always see what patterns you have going on. But like I said, when I use patterns, I usually use edit, define pattern, which you'll see me do at nauseum. And what it's doing when it does that is adding a pattern to this pattern panel. They just have a separate place where you can keep an eye on what you have. And if you're at the point where you are adding patterns to a particular project, you can go on and choose different ones to see how they look and it's just handy to have it there. Another thing that I don't tend to use very often, but you might want to set up is to use the Move tool and I'll show you how to use that in a minute. All right, so we're gonna put layers on this and I'm going to be working with a straw far pattern. The first thing I'm gonna do is open up one of my folders of images and I'm going to drop and drag some of these pictures onto this surface. These are straw flower icons. You just drop and drag and hit. Okay. Then you can move them around like this. And sometimes I like to adjust the elements a little bit after I've plugged them in, maybe they're not as bright as I want, so I hit Okay. What it does is it puts each element on its own layer as a smart object. Smart object means that you can double-click on it and make adjustments and hit Save. And it'll bring those adjustments back to the original or what they would call the parent file. When I double-click on this one, it brings it up in a new window. And this isn't a very big file. So if I look at it, image size, it's only 1500 pixels by 72 resolution. And that's because it is a digital digital file that's been not vectorized, but it's been edited in a way that stylize it. And so it's not really a photo anymore. That's why it looks a little pixel we hear. It's just not, it's just it's big to fill the screen. Anyway, what I'm going to do is brightness up a little bit. So I went to work right on the main layer here. I'm going to hit Command M, which brings up the curves function. And I can just brighten this up a little bit. Hit Okay, and then go up to File and Save. And it's going to save this adjustment to this file. And it's also going to bring the adjustment back to this one. I can close out of this now, that's the benefit of having it be a smart object. You don't always have to do that. Sometimes I just bring things in by different methods and they aren't smart objects. You can go either way, whatever works for you. I'm going to continue on dragging things in. This is another one that I think I want to adjust a little bit. So I'm going to again hit the Smart Object. Then Command M. Which is curves, Command or Control M. Brighten it up and then hit Save, File Save. I do this at this point because sometimes I want things brighter and darker. So I'm totally fine with editing it as we go along. I don't always want things bright. That's why I just wait till I bring it all in to see how they compare to each other. Now I'm going to bring in some other straw flowers. So we'll bring in this one, which is much higher, bigger, bigger file. Move it off to the side, hit Enter. Again, it's on its own layer. This one as well. And you'll see that they start to overlap. That's okay. We're going to be moving these around and adjusting them. My dog is being really loud. Let's see if I got them all in here. Here's a white straw flower. We'll grab this one. You may have noticed these are all straw flower examples. One thing for future reference I want to recommend right now is that when you're cutting out your flowers, which we'll learn how to do in later steps, always have different angles. And in this case I have some flat round ones which kind of looked like buttons or just circle faces of flowers. These are really handy for covering up the ends of stems and things have a variety. I think this is probably good for now. How many do we have here? We've got a few. Let's see. I thought I had a few more. Here's one more straw flower. We'll just add this one. This one's pretty big. Resolution wise. All right. Now let's look at pattern preview. To get to Pattern Preview, which is a function of Mu and Nu for newer function in Photoshop that we're gonna use a lot. And we're gonna do that by hitting View pattern preview. It says Pattern Preview mode will work, but the preview is only visible in OpenGL enabled documents, document window. Not sure. Unfortunately, sometimes when Photoshop has an update or your RAM gets low on your computer because you've been doing a lot of things. You can get random errors like that. So what I did was I just stopped everything. I saved this out as a PSD file, save a copy, and then I saved it just to the original folder where all the icons, whereas a Photoshop file cancel that out and I saved it and then restarted Photoshop. I actually quit the whole thing, brought open it up again and now it works. So let's try it again. View pattern preview. And it pops open this big screen with a blue square. And now we can start to move our elements around. The move tool is one that you can use. You have to go up here to make sure that it's choosing the layer. There's a group or layer. If I chose the group, it would move everything. But I just wanted to move each individual element. Now I can move things around like this and just grab the individual pieces and move them where I want them to go. The reason that I don't tend to use the Move tool a lot. I use this for tweaking and I'll talk about this in another video. To use the move tool just for tweaking things. But I don't tend to use this option very much because I like to reduce the size and rotate things and I can't do that intuitively with the move tool. This is better for just kind of nudging things along. But it's something that you definitely can't do. If I was going to make a pattern in this way, I can go ahead and do that. This would work. I mean, it depending on the type of icons that you're using are elements that you're using. It does, it does work, but I like to be a little bit more organic with it. So what I like to do instead is to use the command t.test function. There are two ways to get the transform tool to work. The one that I use most frequently is the command t plus option. Makes sure that you selected a layer, hit Command T and then it will put a blue box around and you can move it. And then you can grab the corners on the outside and rotate it. Then you just hit return when it's in the place that you want it. And the old-school way to find it is to go to Edit and then hit Free Transform. And you might notice here when you go to Edit and Free Transform, let's return so we can go to Edit Free Transform. There's a little thing here and it shows the shortcut on your computer. It may be different as the default, but mine is the command option, which is the, it has an icon on it on my keyboard. And then t, When I hit those two and it activates it. So if you're ever using something a lot in Photoshop, it's always cool to see if there's a shortcut that's already assigned to it that you can just memorize to access it. Another one that you'll see that I use quite a bit is a function for edit fill. And when I want to go to, let's see image, see Edit, Fill. And it's grayed out right now because I'm not using it, but it's the up arrow, which is Shift F5. And that will bring up the fill function. And I use that an awful lot as well. So if you ever hear me using a shortcut and you're unsure unsure of where I'm getting that from. You can always go to the long-form way of finding a tool and then see if there's a shortcut there. Just makes working in Photoshop a lot, lot faster. I do it a lot for layers as well. Command J. You can always do an Layer, New layer. And you can see here that there is a another way to do that, shift, shift command and then also Layer via Copy, which is Command J. Just using the shortcuts helps your workflow be a lot less clunky. So anyway, I'm ready to get started. I just wanted to go over those few things. There's a lot that we use it again in Photoshop that is not normally used with, with photo editing that you may already be familiar with. So I'm going to continue on my merry, merry way, making this pattern for today behind the scenes. And I will see you in the next video. 5. Creating a New Document + Using the Pattern Window: I continued on and I made this pattern. And I'm gonna show you how to make lots of different styles of patterns. So you'll be able to construct something similar to this by the end of the class. But I wanted to show how you can use the pattern window that I just showed you over here to use the patterns. Now you won't use this probability of the end, but it's good to have an overview of the, the goals of the class so that you can kind of visualize where you're headed. So you don't have to understand all of this now because it will get through it. But I just wanted you to see in the end this little shortcut that can help you put the pattern onto different things. I mentioned in the previous video that it doesn't really matter what size your pattern is because you can always scale it to whatever size. So I wanted to show you how to do that now, in case you start to play with patterns early on and want to put them on something for print on-demand. And just you'll need to know that little bit of information upfront. So I thought I'd do it right away versus putting it at the end of the class. Here I've completed the pattern and what I did was I used Pattern Preview as you saw me in the previous video. What I did was I took the little icons, the little elements, whatever you want to call them, and I just made them. It's kind of small. And I place them all over, crossing over the edge in some places. And then where there was ever a naked bottom of a flower like this one I didn't do or this one. But a lot of them, I went and put a flower head over the top of it to just neaten it up. I don't like a lot of sharp edges of my pattern, so that's something I do, but there's plenty of patterns out there where people just have ends of stems just kind of sticking everywhere. Totally fine. Whatever works and works for you. I turned off Pattern Preview when I was done with that. And then I wanted to add this pattern to the pattern section here, the pattern panel. I went down to the plus sign in it. It'll open up a window and you can rename this if you want and hit Okay, there's my pattern. Now, we showed in the previous video how to create a new document. So I'm gonna go knew one of the sizes I like to make for a lot of of different projects is a large large tile for things that might be very large, like a duvet or something like that, a big cover or rock or something like that. So I usually try to make a pretty big size. In this case, 13,500 by 13,500. If there's a specific size that you need for a project, for instance, maybe you're making an eight by ten rug and the company gives you the specific parameters that you need to fill that rug. And then you could plug in those specific parameters over here. But this is the one I'm going to do is just to show you. Now, it's super, super simple by just clicking on the pattern, I can add it to the, the size. Now if I want to adjust the scale of it, I can go over to my Layers panel and you will see that there's this little icon with the pattern on it. If you double-click on it, it'll give you the pattern fill menu and you'll see this in other videos. We use this again and again. But right now the scale is 100%. If I wanted to take it down and make it a little bit more like a ditsy pattern or a small pattern. I could go ahead and do that like that. If it was making a very small pattern, you can also increase the percentage as well. You do have to be careful when you're increasing the size of it that the individual elements don't start to pixel out and look pixel. In this case, these different icons actually can handle quite a bit of expansion, but you just want to be careful with that. So I can, I can put the pattern to whatever scale I want and I can actually move it around to make it look nice. So if this was going to be a duvet cover, say for a queen size bed, I could figure what would I want to look at it if my little head is up here and this is, you know, about this big and this is a big king size duvet cover. How big do I want these flowers? Do I want them as big as my head or do I want them more subtle? Maybe something like this for a king size do Bay would be good for me. And I can move it around and randomize it. That may be what I'd like for printing. And of course, knowing that a king size mattress or concise debate is pretty huge, these flowers are still fairly big. You can definitely play with that and figure out what size do you want. You can also start to see what the repeat looks like. You will see the repeat the bigger you make it. I see that there's some room for improvement here. I can see the repeat happening quite easily. And that's just par for the course for almost any, any pattern to have, it truly feels seamless. You're gonna have to either use many, many elements like 131415 elements, so that the eye loses track of the repeat or position them in a way that is a little bit less linear. But whatever you do, you can practice with that. That's neither here nor there. Let's just something I noticed. This pattern here you can hardly tell where one part of the pattern begins and another ends. It's very random at this resolution at 100%. So that is how you add it. It's a really handy thing to use his pattern panel. I have other patterns in here that I've made. In the same way I can just go in here and double-check, double-click, and add it down. So if you're working through a project and you want to add a lot of patterns to particular size. You can bank all the patterns in here and add them and then go in and mess with them. See you? This one is I can make this a little bit bigger. It just really, really handy. Oops, that one. Let's see what's going on with that one. It's at 484%. So like that anyway, those are a couple of things that I want you to just bank away and you don't want necessarily need to use them right now. But the pattern window and the creating new documents is really important to this class. So again, I don't use this very often except in my, when I'm sending out lots of patterns on a particular size, like a king sized UVA and I'm making a whole bunch of them, then I use this, but rarely in the class will I use this because we were just focusing on that one pattern, but I wanted you to know about it. There we go. Let's jump into the rest of the videos. 6. Basic Skill: Cutting Out Flowers: One of the key components of this class is cutting out subjects from the background. And you will see me do it in many projects. But I wanted to just have a separate video here to review the tools. And sometimes they move a little quickly and then working on different projects. And I want to make sure I cover every aspect of cutting things out and be clear about how it all works. I brought an image over here into Photoshop from Lightroom. Just edit in Photoshop. And this is how it looks straight at the camera. It's a raw file. So what I start over here to do is crop it and I can crop in Lightroom. I can also clean up spots and speckles and dust marks and all of that enlightenment as well. It's no different if you do it in Lightroom or over here, or just different tools. But I found in more recent work that I do when I'm doing a lot of them, it's easier just to send all the raw files over and do it over here. But what your mileage may vary whatever you like. Then I look at it and think, is there any kind of pre editing I want to do? I might go in here and remove some spots, like dust spots from my camera sensor, which is pretty common. And if there's little bugs that are tucked inside petals, blemishes, that kind of thing. Quite often I will either lower increased exposure. This one's kind of dirty, so I might clean that up a little bit. I just go through and do any kind of pre editing. And I can also do this after the fact. It's no big deal. All right, so it's a little bit bright. So what I'm gonna do is use Command M. You can also just go to Image Adjustments and then go to curves. Show you how to do that. You can go to Image Adjustments, go to curves, and do it that way. And perhaps I want to lower the highlights on the side just a little bit, maybe bumped the mid tones a little bit. I like things to be pretty flat. I don't know if shooting flat lighting sometimes I use really dramatic lighting as you see here. But whatever it is, I just want to make sure that everything is visible. There isn't anything black are blown out or anything like that. So I fixed that up. And then I'm gonna go to the Select menu, Select and down to select unmask. I won't always use this. Sometimes I'll use Select Color Range, and that is sometimes the only way you can do really intricate things. There's a lot of different ways you'll watch me cut things out. But this is a pretty standard subject with a round head and a bud here. Pretty good subject to start with. Now there's two options here. You can have color aware or object aware. Generally speaking, I go color aware. Sometimes though, I will find that the program does not make good selections at all. And so I'll flip it to object or object aware. You can try either one. The default that I like to choose for view is the overlay, which is by default read. The other ones are not as easy for me to see and make sense of, so I just choose that one, but there are a lot of different ones that you can choose. As far as the settings over here go. I don't really use a lot of them except the smooth one. There are things like the radius. You can play with these if you really get stuck, if you want to start over, you can clear the selection right here. Also, you can restore back to reset the workspace with this button down here. Now I'm going to hit Select Subject, which is up in the upper-left corner. See how well it does. It got most of it. I got the awesome head, miss the stem which is still red, got some of the leaves, got the bud, but then it left some of the background on behind the bud. Now there are several brushes that we can use. The first one that's on by default is one that's a picker button. It's a Quick Selection Tool. You can go ahead and use that on areas that didn't get selected that are larger. For instance, this down, I can click onto it and drive a little bit, and it will do its best to grab the stem. As long as I stay within the boundary of the stem, it usually does a pretty good job of picking and I can grab this leaf right here, maybe down there. That worked pretty well. I'd want to look around the edge. This is a big thing with flowers. You'll see areas like this where you have little divots that come in that did not completely get selected. This white area is what we want selected. What I do is go to the next brush, which is the refined brush tool. And it works best or refine edge tool. Brush. It works best on areas that are the secondary selections. So most of the flower was chosen, but this wasn't, this brush does not work very good on big open expanses. It works best on areas that are nestled between your selection and not selected like this little white area. I can click on it. Then I go look around the perimeter, see if there's any other areas that didn't get selected because those will show on the final. And I just look for any areas that there's white. If you use this brush too large and you select too much, it will start to remove things from important areas that have already been selected and we'll turn them pink. I tend to use the brush that fits the space or tap around. You'll see me do a lot of different things. It just depends on the subject. Sometimes I'm just practicing to see what works better. Sometimes it has a mind of its own and it doesn't do a great job. Other times it does a wonderful job. The final thing that I like to do once I've made my selection here is to go to the smooth slider. I zoom in. What this does is it stops and smooth some of the ragged edge. Now you can see here it didn't pick the whole, the whole petal. There's a little bit that's hidden behind the red. That's okay. I want the edge to be smooth. This basically moves the selection inward and smooth everything out. I'd rather have a smooth selection than a jagged edge. Again, I have the Refine Edge brush tool and I saw a little area right here that needs to be selected and bumped in. A little area right there. You just do the best you can. All right, so the selection is done and I can hit hopes maybe it's not done. That's just a second. There's a little white right here. You've got to be a real sleuth because sometimes you can't see these things right away. There is a little bit along this edge, that's a problem. So I'm going to just select along here, make sure that it's fully selected. You see how the white banding kind of went away. If I go along the edge there, then it pop in better. It's just a good idea to go around any random edges that you have. Just double-check and then hit. Okay? Now in order to select this and put it onto its own layer, I need to make sure that an object selection tool is selected. If you go to the Quick Selection Tool up here is a box that also contains the Quick Selection Tool and the object selection tool and the Magic Wand are all behind this icon wherever it happens to be in your menu, that's the one you want. Because if you have something else elected, the next step won't work. I make sure I'm up there that I right-click on the selection and do Layer via Copy. Then I turn off my background layer, and then I have my selection. Okay? Then I just go ahead and I save this file, save as a copy. That's a new thing in Photoshop. New-ish, and you want to make sure that you save it as a copy. Choose PNG to maintain the transparent background and then save it into a folder. Another step that you can do if you want prior to this is to trim the image. I don't always do this because I've already cropped it and I don't necessarily need it to be super trimmed. But if you want to save space and you want not a lot of extraneous pixels and edges on your image, you can go ahead and do the trim function. I'm just waiting for it to finish saving. You've got an image at the top trim and OK. It's just going to tuck it in right to the edge there. I don't need that really. It's not that big of a deal, but sometimes if I'm cutting something out for whatever reason, I might have a lot of negative space. There are times that I will extract multiple things from one file. For instance, I will have three flower heads in one picture, and I wanted to just extract one of those flower heads. Well, when I do that, and you'll see me possibly do this in another section. I end up with a lot of negative space, so trimming helps to isolate just what I've selected. I don't make sense as we move on. But anyway, I'm just going to go over the top of this one with what I did here, PNG. And I'm just going to hit, Save and Replace. And hit. Okay. There we have our little cutout. So it's super simple. Every one is different though, and that's something that I want to be abundantly clear on as you're cutting things out. Some of them are simple. Some of them like this are easy because it's just a flower head. Other ones can be really, really complicated. If we have like little spiky things are fuzzy, things like this one here of the straw flowers was a lot harder because you've had a lot more nooks and crannies for things to get lost in and to confuse the program. The things that's super confused the program or things like this, which have multiple tiny areas. This can be really hard, hard to do. Sometimes it's a sacrifice. Sometimes you have to just do your best and at times you just have to kind of give up uncertain selections. And I wanted to try one of those to kind of show you what that is. So this is called Dhara. It's a pretty fun thing here. Let's look at this one. I'm gonna take this over into Photoshop and we'll work on this one. And you can see how a more complicated subject works. The first thing again, I want to do is to crop. We're gonna crop this as much as I can. Again, we can always trim it later. But I think close elections often make it easier for the program to figure out what it is you're selecting. Now in this case, I'm going to open up the curves menu. You can either go Image Adjustment Curves or in this case, I'm just going to do Command M, which is the shortcut. I'm going to bump up the curves in the middle and also open the shadows a little bit. And the reason I'm doing this is to flatten this image and make the background is pure. White as I can. There's a reason for this. I want the background to not have a lot of variegation or shadows because that's gonna make this harder to pick. Let me show what happens when we go to Select and select and mask as we've used before, select subject. And you're gonna see it does an okay job, but not the best. And when I go in here to refine the edge and try to get out these white portions. Problem arises. It starts to pick more and more of the actual plant that we're trying to select. And if you zoom way in here, you can see that there's pink on a lot of the stems and the blossoms. And this can be really problematic. I could go in here with the selection tool and try to select these bits. But it doesn't always do a good job and it's really tedious. What else can we do? Let's reset this one. What I can do is reset this whole thing. I'm just going to cancel out of it and go to Select Color Range. Now in this case, I shot it on a white background. So I'm trying to select the white, anything that's white, unfortunately, this object doesn't have any white on it. If it did have pure white on it, it would be problematic. A white flower or a very bright blown out flower. Maybe a problem. What do I do? Well, I'm gonna go to the plus button here, which is the selector that adds to the selection. Make sure I'm on sample colors. I'm gonna start to click around this subject all over, looking at the screen to see what still needs to be selected. That does a pretty good job. Does it do a great job? Not necessarily, but I mean, we're gonna see it's as good as I can get here. Fuzziness increases the selection and starts to kind of go into the areas here. In the more I go, the more it turns white and there's a happy spot in here that we're looking for that selects all of the white and none of the plant itself. We're gonna, we're gonna give this a go right here and hit Okay. Alright, so now what I'm going to do is delete this selection or invert it. I'm sorry, we're going to invert it. I'm gonna go invert, select Inverse, which selects the subject itself and then Layer via Copy. Now we can see that it did a pretty good job of selecting it. And you can always check by adding a solid color background layer. We're gonna put dark behind it here. Then it shows us if we did an okay selection job, actually did a really good job. There's very little to clean up here. And when I do stylized things like painterly processing, I think there's like a spiderweb or something in there. This did a pretty good job. So that is how we can do ways to do common selections. And again, you'll see me do this over and over again. But I wanted to have a separate video just to give you an idea of the tools and where to look and make sure that I didn't miss anything in upcoming videos. All right, thanks, buh-bye. 7. Remember to Shoot Multiple Angles!: When you're cutting out different individual elements. One of the things I want to convey up front here is that you want to shoot from multiple angles. If I go into my Lightroom, you can see that I did a little shoot here. This is all one shoot. And I took 176 images at one time, working through a few flowers I had. And I do them from multiple, multiple angles. And the ones that have the white background, these are the ones I've already cut out. The transparency shows as white in Lightroom. This is a single leaf, but I do it from several angles. And the reason I do that is so that when I want to composite, I have different angles. And so sometimes what I found is that I was cutting out images that looked more like this. Just straight forward, leaves kind of flat to the camera. Reason being I can get it all in focus and it's easy to cut out that way. The problem is, is like on a row is this is a rose leaf. You would have to have a rose that is straight to the camera. Let's get onto my roses like this one here. This is the type of rows that would have a leaf that would look like the one I just showed you prior. If I photograph a rose like this, which needs a lot of clean up, I cut it out but it needs a lot of cleanup yet. The leaves that are straight on like this aren't going to work. What I'd like to do is go in and take photographs of the leaves at different angles. And I'll just quickly run you through the cut-out process. Again, because this is something that you'll do a lot of. The big thing about cutting out anything. It's preparation, making sure that you set it up for success because it can be hard if you don't. Shooting things in nature is way harder to cut things out than if you have a background that's one color. And the next step I either try to cut it out or I can do Command M or image adjustments curves, and try to brighten it up a little bit. Then I go to Select, Select and Mask. Make sure it's on color aware because pretty much this whole subject is one color, which makes it easier if I could do object aware too, you always have the choice of choosing color aware or object aware. I usually prefer color aware, but sometimes I go object to where that one isn't working well at all. And then I got to hit Select Subject like that. And it did a good job almost immediately. There was no problem. I see a little white dot here, which is probably a dusk back. So I'm gonna take the default that's going on here, the one that's called Quick Selection tool and hit the minus because I want to remove this white bit from the selection. And then I'm gonna go down to the second one, which is the Refine Edge, which only works best if you've already got a major selection down like this. And then I see this little white tip down there. So I'm going to just touch that briefly, make sure that I get all the little areas that are white covered. Then I like to hit the smooth a little bit. Global refinements. I don't do anything much except for smoothing. I'm edge detection with radius. I mean, you can try playing with that. I usually don't. There's a lot of different ones that you can do. For the most part, I just used the smooth, then I hit Okay? In this case, you'll notice that my background is blue. You can always go up here and change that color. There are different things that you can use. You'll see it in other videos. You can choose color, onion skin, marching ants, black and white. I just changed the default color is red and I change it to blue because I was working with a lot of red color. Red flowers are pink flowers which made the red hard to see. You can customize that. Then I go up to the selection tool here, which it can be one of the three. It can be object or objects selection, Quick Selection or magic wand, any one of those, it's on the same icon and it could be anywhere in this menu depending on where you put it. If you don't have eaten, go to the three dots down here and add it to the mix if it isn't already. By going to Edit toolbar, I show that in another video, but I just wanted to briefly show that if you can't find it, but you have to have, you have to have this on it in order to right-click and then Layer via Copy. That is your cutout that I go to Image trim. Okay? And it removes extra pixels. File, save a copy, save it as a PNG for transparency, I'm gonna just been saving them in my flowers folder because I scroll through this folder constantly. You do also have like a leaf folder as well. I guess I have several roses, so I'll put it in here. Then it hit Save. I used to rename everything, like calling it Rose Lee for the specific breed of rows. But in the last month or so, I've gone to just leaving the original Nick copy name. The reason I do that is if I want to find it again in Lightroom, say. I can search using the the name of the file. Or if I want to find not so much in Lightroom, but if I want to find it on my computer, I can look in Lightroom, see what the name is here, and then I can find the cut-out. Sometimes they cut things out on my iPad. I cut them out other places and keeping the original filename makes it easier to find it later because I can just dial that in and then the original will pop up wherever it happens to be. What I tend to do is bring it over whole bunch of items. I don't save it as a PSD and then I just continue working through all these images that I've brought over and cut them out. Like that. Let's do a flower quick, just to recap. So I start with cropping, make sure it's unconstrained so that you can move it wherever you want. Cutoff as much extraneous as I can. Select, Select and Mask, select subject. It didn't get the whole stem, so the default is already chosen. That is the quick selection tool. I'm just going to quickly tap at the tiny brush on the stem here. And you'll see that it does a pretty good job of grabbing the stem, just sliding it within the stem. Zoom in, make sure I don't have any white. Using the Refine Edge Tool. You'll have to try it a couple of different ways. Sometimes tapping on the area works better than drop than dragging. Sometimes dragging works better than tapping. It depends on the image. And then I like to go to smooth, which just helps to refine the edge a little bit and hit Okay, backup to my selection icon so that I can right-click and Layer via Copy. Then I don't really need to trim this one because it's pretty close already, but I can just to show you image trim. It helps to have the file be as close into the selection as possible, just so that. And it just is easier to work with later. File, Save a Copy. I'm going to go back to my flowers folder. Choose PNG, hit Save. And Okay. Once that saves, then I just go ahead and sometimes it gets stuck saving and if you click around it, it finishes faster than not saving it. And then I just carry out on my merry way. This is the best plan. I found four cutouts because I can also process them different ways. I have actions which I'll show in other videos for different ways to process these images. And you can go ahead and do that to the images that are cut out, the elements that are cut out. But when I'm in a hurry and I just did a shoot and I want to get them all filed away for future use. This is what I do and you'll see me do this, you'll see me break it down and struggle sometimes with it isn't always as straightforward and easy as this, especially if there's like little feathery things or anything that's like resembles hair on a, on a flower, maybe some fuzz or stringy things or whatever. It's not always as neat and tidy as this. And then I also tried to go in and get rid of dust spots. I shoot these really deep depth of field, usually 14 to 16 f at 14 to 16. And that means that every desk bot on my sensor is going to show. But I only am really concerned about the ones that are on the subject itself. I used to. You'll see me do this removal of these because sometimes they get left over the selection and you miss it. Then when you go to build a composite, you have random specks around. But I've gotten lazy after doing 500 or so cutouts or so this last month that I just figure I'll deal with it later if they're there. Anyway. I just wanted to show you that. 8. Cutting Out a Tricky Subject: Hey, we're gonna show up a subject that has a few complications with it and then just work through it together. This is Lavinia missed and I photographed it on a white piece of foam core with a third hand tool at the bottom that you can see here. One of the things that we want to do first is to try to isolate our subject as much as possible. And we're gonna do that through cropping and adjusting the exposure. I'm going to just crop this in. There's no ratio that you need. You can use unconstrained because you're not going to crop it in a particular size. It's because this isn't really for that purpose. It's just to eliminate as much of the peripheral white as we can. I'm going to clone that are clipped that by clicking. Okay. And now what I want to do is see what I can do to try and make the background is different from the subject as possible. The first thing I'm gonna do is grab my heel tool or clone tool. And I'm going to get out of this, anything that is in the way in this case, there's just a smudge on the back of my phone core. Works faster to use this slider. And I'm gonna get rid of any dust particles that might be there. Just because the program may pick it up as being something of relevance and then try to save it. But we won't do too much of that. There's another spot there. We'll just leave that alone because that's not probably going to be a problem. Okay, then the next thing I want to do is try to make as much contrast between the subject and the background as possible. So I'm gonna go down to color here and maybe lower the luminance of the green a bit so that it's a bit darker. And I lowered the saturation of the green already. Lower the saturation of the yellow a little bit because I'd like to reduce the color space as much as possible. We don't want to have each subject have a 100 colors, which is typical with photos. They can have millions of colors. And so we're trying to just simplify as much as possible. So anything I can do to do that over here is helpful. The other thing I can do is go to texture and crank that over a little bit. That's going to sharpen up the edges. I could do clarity as well. That might require me to increase the vibrance a bit because clarity tends to desaturate things a bit. But you can see how I'm just trying to make this Levin and missed as sharp as possible because I've done all that. I might actually go in here still and get rid of this spot which is not feathered as much, maybe having trouble with my tool for whatever reason. Then going to the white's going to crank it over a little bit more. I just want it to be as contrast as possible and then go edit in Photoshop. How did we practice? We reduced the colors a little bit. We increase the contrast and clarity and texture, which is more like sharpness. I guess if you're thinking about it as far as making it CRISPR, we increase the whites in the background just to make them as bright as possible without blowing out the subject. And we cropped it. Now we want to try to remove what's going on here. So I'm gonna make a duplicate of the layer. You can just drag the background down to the plus tool. Otherwise you can use the command Command J, which will also duplicate it. Not sure why command J is duplicate because I'm not sure what J stands for, but we just make a duplicate so we have something to fall back on in case it just doesn't work. I'm going to turn off the background there. Alright. Now I'm going to use the Select menu. A period of Photoshop through will help the Select menu and selected mask. Now when I hit the Select Subject, I know already that it's not going to do the best hub because it just doesn't. If you find that your program is doing this with your subject and it's not looking really very good. There are, there are ways to continue on your merry way from this point. There's some tools over here on the left-hand side. And the first one is just a basic brush, which is the Quick Selection Tool, which you could give a go and try it. You could lasso your subject here and see if it does a good job, but you see it tends to just kind of be a hammer. It collects everything including the background. I'm going to undo that by hitting Command Z. The next one is the Refine Edge brush tool, which I find works better in this situation for just about everything. When you start to brush over it, it's going to search for the subject and grab it. And as you can see, it does an excellent job. I mean, if we zoom in here, you can see that it's pretty much grabbed the whole thing. This is my preferred method. It gets rid of the white, it selects the green, and in this case it's just working a treat. So sometimes it doesn't, it, this will never work this well on a busy background. If this Levin and missed was in the wild with grass behind it as as it was found, this would not work. It would select all the grass and you would have a mass. Not selecting everything though, because you can see when you zoom in here. That there's a bunch of pink on this little bud which we don't want because that's telling me that it's not selecting part of it. We can refine this a little bit by either going to the negative and brushing over it. If I make this brush smaller, I'm using my left bracket key. I can try to paint on this and it will attempt to select it, but it's not doing a great job. Going back to my original brush, that kind of looks like it did in the beginning. Still not very good. Then I can go down to this little box with an arrow at the bottom, the Select menu. And I like to choose lasso. There's rectangle and lasso. And then when the two white boxes means that you're adding to the selection. I wanted to add to the selection. So that's what I want to do. I'm gonna circle around the place that's pink, that I want to be part of my selection. And it crashed. This happens, this happens frequently. I could close out of this and just start over and not record it, but I just wanted you to I guess I'll leave it to see if that does happen. I like to go over here to the select tool, which is the object selection tool, and make sure I have lasso chosen and add to subject. And when I circle this, it's going to take all the red and it's going to add it to the selection. I can do that here as well. There's always options. I choose red overlay from the drop-down menu, but there's onion skin marching ants on white on black, black and white on layers. But I tend to choose the red one. This lets me see what's selected and what isn't, and it just works better for me generally. Then I can go back to the Refine Edge tool, maybe reduce its size and paint over any areas that aren't selected. So there's an edge here, the edge of the spiky leaf that wasn't selected. This is the best that we are probably going to get at this point with this object. It's good. I mean, it's good enough for what we're doing and we're just going to grab the tip. So these little leaves like that. Maybe down here. The time and effort put in, in this part of it makes your life easier later to be sure. So just look for any pink That's isn't where it should be. And anything that's still kind of in shadow that could be brought out like, if you look here, see that the end of this little leaf isn't selected, so I just hit it with the refine edge brush. Then hit Okay, at the bottom. Now what it's done here is it's made a mask of the background and it's selected that. So let me remove this background layer, not clicking or taking the click off of it by taking the eyeball off of it. And so we have a mask that's selected the background because remember I had objects selection, so it's selected the object and here we have our selection. To double-check it. We can go to the background and then I just have like any random color swatch here I was working with. Go down to the little circle with the half, half, full half. Not hit solid color and then hit Okay, and that'll just let us see how we did as far as picking out the back, picking it out from the background. Let's just choose a really more random color here. So like a dark pink. This is looking very good for our intents and purposes. So I can click it off. That was just a check. Now, I want to do File, Save a Copy. And I'm going to go to my folder where I saved this stuff. And for me I have a Patterns folder. And then I have a place where I put cutout. So I have a cutouts folder and this is a flower. I'm gonna choose that and then I'm going to choose PNG because it's on a transparent background and I want to keep it that way. Then I can just say Levin and missed. I have other ones in here for love animus. So I'm just gonna say three because I know I have two other Levin a miss in here. If you are doing lots of the same ones, you can just make a separate folders like I have lots of daily, so I have a daily folder if I have lots of love and I missed, I could have 11 missed folder with option 1234 and so forth. But I only have a couple of love and a mess. I've lots of pansies and I have a whole bunch of purple puppies. So you can just do whatever organization system works best for you and then hit Save. That is done. And that can be, this is one of the more complicated types of cutouts to do. I wanted to show you one that's a lot more simple. Let's go back to Lightroom. And I have a daily here, so I told you I do a lot of daylilies and this one's in nature. I didn't do it in the studio. I don't like to pick the day lilies because I really liked them in nature. That's why I have them there. They're not very good cut flowers. And they're not good cut flowers because they have buds behind them that won't bloom if you go and pick it. So in order to appreciate all of the blooms on it, what are they gonna escape? That's what they call them per day, luis, you have to make sure that you don't pick them. You can pick off the dead blooms as they come and let the next one's arrive, but they're just more of a landscape flower. Now, the thing to help with this election, this one doesn't need much help because honestly it's got a really dark background. But I don't have to do much. I'm going to bring this over into Photoshop. I was gonna do more over here, but I don't really feel like it. You want it quite contrasty. And I was thinking of brightening this and adding some clarity and texture. But for the most part, this is pretty good. For a cutout. I can always amend and change the color and saturation and intensity later. Again, duplicate the layer. I will just drag it down to the plus sign again command J, and then go to the Select menu and select and mask. This is very obvious, so the program shouldn't have too much trouble when we hit the select object tool or Select Subject tool, and it doesn't. But we do want to zoom in and use our refined brush tool, which is the second one, because we do see that there's some green missing. And also if you zoom way, way and you'll see that there's a little bit of a triangle of dark green back there. We want the mask to go into those little nooks and crannies. Also, I'm seeing some paint here, so I'm gonna go to my select tool like I did before, add to selection, which is the first one. Give it a little ring around it and it's going to take that pink away, which means it's added all of this to this election and not left that out. It would be semi-transparent if I didn't do anything. Back to the Refine Edge tool. We've got this little, little tiny triangle there. Again, the pink overshot it. So I go back to this tool and select as carefully as I can. Refine edge tool. Little triangle of dark. We're just trying to get the edge to be as nicely selected as possible. We can also go over here and use some of the settings that are in this. Here's a really obvious one, like that. We can hit smooth. I don't actually use a lot of these, but they do use a smooth slider basically that's just going to make it less jagged. If you're doing a leaf or something that has little fuzzy hairs on it, using the smooth tool helps a lot. You can feather it. You can shift the edge in or out. This just moves the whole selection in or further away. You can experiment with that. Some things that you're selecting, it'll work amazingly and you won't have to do any tweaking. Others. It doesn't work as hot and you're gonna be doing a lot of tweaking. You can just see that I just jumped back and forth between the tools. Go around the entire perimeter. It doesn't hurt to swipe the Refine Edge tool along the whole thing. Sometimes you just don't even see the random pixels that aren't being picked. For the most part assist the deepest next and crannies that gives me the most problems right here. I'm just swiping. We're just about back to our leaf, which is kind of where we started. There. Let's zoom back out. I'm just pinching in this case. And that's looking really good so I can hit, Okay. We see over here the mask and the black. So when I take off the background, it should disappear and we have our selection. So now I can save this as a PNG file. Save a copy. Go to my patterns, go to my cutouts, my flowers, dailies. I have some daylilies in here, so I want to choose PNG to preserve the translucent background and then I'll just say big yellow belt there. I was changing my mind and then went back to big yellow. Hit. Okay, alright, so now we have our pieces that are ready for the next step, which is digitizing them into either something that's vector like or more painterly to make it a little bit easier to reduce colors and still have it be effective. So this is the first photographic step and then everything else stems from this. We'll talk more about all of that in the next video. 9. Using Lr or ACR Selection Tool to Prep a Cut Out: In this video, I want to show you how to prep the image using the subject selection tool, which is available in the latest version of Lightroom CC and Adobe Camera Raw, CSI. Alright, the first thing that we want to do is use our crop tool and get rid of the third hand tool showing. Before I used the clone and heal tool to clean up the background. We have a way of making it a lot easier. In the latest version of Lightroom, you go to the circle with dots around it, which is the subject selection tool. The initial push in my mind is to go to the subjects Selection Tool or Select Subject tool. That does not work so well as you will see when it detects a subject, not only does it not get the entire flower and seed head, what it gets is all the area between the individual little feathery leaves and that's not good. That's not gonna work. So we're going to delete all those masks are just that mask. And then I went to Select Sky, which ironically works a lot better when in doubt if something isn't working, if you have it on a clear background like this, and it's not doing a good job of getting the whole thing. Go to Lightroom or ACR if you are just using, we're using Photoshop and do this. And while we can't do the cutout right here, which I really wish we could, but we can do is prep this background so that it's easier to cut out in Photoshop. What I'm gonna do is up the whites, up the exposure, and up the highlights even. And then I'm going to have this already that way. And so what this does is it helps to get the background completely white and that is going to help over in Photoshop. We've essentially blown out any of the dust speckles. We've even the color of the background. So now we can go into Photoshop, edit in Photoshop. What we can do is cut it out here. Now, when I go to my regular select, Select and Mask, we run into some issues because I do this flex subject, it's still going to have the same problems that it had over in Lightroom. It's likely only going to pick part of it and not the whole thing. Not so hot, that's not gonna work. So I cancel that out. But now I'm going to go to Select Color Range. And in this case I can choose the white of the background, which is now even and clean. And that makes it very easy for the program to see what isn't white, which is the resulting flower. Now, this doesn't work so well. If your flower has white on it, then you're going to have to do some hand cleaning up, as you'll see in other videos. But in this case it does a miraculous job pretty much. We can adjust the fuzziness to get all of the subjects or as much as we can hit. Okay, Making sure that our subject selection tool over on the toolbar is selected. I can now right-click do Layer. Oops, Not yet. I have to invert the selection right now we've selected the white area. I'm going to right-click and hit select the inverse. Because I wanted to just select the flower and not the background Right-click Layer via Copy. Now our flower is cut out. I can test it by going to the bottom layer, making sure that my top swatch is black, then going to solid color. And this can give us a preview of how well the program cut it out. Now we are missing a few things. There's a little bit down here That's that's transparent that I'd like not to be. I can show you quickly how I fix that. I'm going to engage the background layer and duplicate it by hitting Command J. I'm going to bring this background layer up to the top, which now covers up the whole works. Deactivate the background layer. I don't need that anymore. And then I'm going to highlight the top layer, which is the original, go into the mask. Now I want to make this mask black. In my case, I'm going to do Command I to invert it. So now I've made this disappear. But it's still there. I can reveal it by using a brush and a white mask. And white brush, sorry, white brush on a black mask. I think my brush a little bit bigger and I can paint all the areas that are missing. Now you see there are some little white areas on the edges. I'm not going to worry about that with a painterly technique that I do. That's going to not be a problem. But I just wanted to fill in some of that that was missing. And now I can merge these two by clicking on that layer. And the next layer that I was working on, I can go down to merge layers. Now. I have my cutout with all of the bits and pieces that I want. I'm going to go to Image trim, hit, Okay? And this will take away all the extraneous edges. And now I can save this cut-out for use in our pattern. So that's another way to do it. While I really wish that we could use Lightroom to actually make the mask and save the mask. Unfortunately, we don't have that opportunity right now to just save it. So it does help us clean up the background. And as long as we don't have a lot of white on our subject, we can do that. The other thing that you can do is make the background dark if you want to, you could go the opposite direction and use blacks and contrast and lower the exposure. Sometimes if you have a very light subject making the background black, that helps. So whatever works, I hope that helps. And on width, next video. 10. Stylizing the Cut Out : Alright, now that I have my loving and missed in my folder, what I'm gonna do is process it in Eichler Rama. And I'm not going to show that I have a complete course on I call aroma that goes through every nook and cranny of that program in my membership area. So you can jump into that for as little as $25 if you want to learn all about it. But I'm going to just take this, this item here and I'm going to AirDrop it to my phone. If you have a Mac, you can just do this and I can just send it over to my phone. And I'm going to quickly process it over there and walk you through the things that I'm going to use for this particular item. I'm going to use I colorado S, which is the iPhone or the phone version of Eichler Rama. Then I'm going to open my image that I just AirDrop it over to myself. And in this case, what I like to do with it is to use a style called coherence. And number four is my typical one that I like to use now as I look at it over here on my phone as a bit intense, I'm going to bring the opacity down just a little bit. But I kinda like it. We're looking to get more graphic with our design. We're looking to have it be a little bit more like a drawing. Because some printing houses need things to be a little more simple and it just depends on your output. If you're going to be using something where you can use a straight up photograph. You can go ahead and do that, and I do that. But I also like to have a version that's a little bit more painterly. So if I go through these different options, I think this works okay, so then I'm going to just save it out as a PNG to my file folder and then you'll see it come on back here in a second. Let me send that back to myself so I'm going to AirDrop it back to my computer. I hit Done here. It's going to come into my Downloads. It's receiving the AirDrop and I can just drop and drag it over into my folder that I've been working in like that. And so this image here is the more stylized version. If I see, Let me just open it and preview here. You can see it. It's got more of a drawing type feel to it. And this is more conducive to making patterns because it has less colors. It's more of a, a drawing. Now there's other options that I could do with this and I'll show you another one. So I'm going to open this with Photoshop. I'll show you another way that we can play with this. And that is using the oil paint filter. I like to use oil paint filter any one of these options for simplifying our wonderful and there are a lot of different options there, so many. You can use Photoshop Gallery filters like the filter gallery with a posterize or cut out. You could use the oil paint filters filter, which I'm going to show you now, you could use Eichler Rama, which we'll get more into as we do more complex patterns and we'll do some different things over there. You can also use painterly programs like Topaz impression. You can use things like snap art from exposure software, lots of different options. So again, just like when we cut this out, let me go find my image here. Alright, so we can go Command J or drag it down so we have a backup of it. And then filter, stylize oil paint. And I'll tell you my favorite settings. My favorite settings are pretty intense. It's stylization, cleanness, scale and bristle detail all the way over to the right and lighting all the way to the left. But I'm going to merge this with the original. I'm not gonna keep it at this effect. Well, I might actually, I like how it's simplified it a lot when we add in, look at the original, you can see that there's some digital noise. There's just a lot of stuff happening. When I go back to the oil paint filter, it softens it. You can see that there is some transparency here in my cutout that I did. So I could merge this with the original to give it more substance and more body, which I think I'm going to do in this case. I am going to click and select and then merge layers. And then I'm gonna save this as a copy. And I'll call this the oil paint version of this. So let's go to my flowers in the front of it. I'm just going to write oil paint. That tells me that that's one that I have done this effect on. Because of the various options I like this one actually better than the eye color AMA version. And you're going to find that, you're going to find that, that some things give the hint of the impression of what you're trying to accomplish better than others. But I like this one a lot. So that is, the next step is just processing the picture into something that's a little bit better for pattern-making. Then this next video we're gonna talk about reducing the colors. 11. Reducing Colors with Index Color and HSL: Hey everyone. Now what I want to talk about is reducing the colors in your image. Because we did the oil paint that actually does a little bit of that work for us. Whenever we take an image and go into another program like I call it Rama or do a filter, like as in this case oil paint. It's going to reduce the amount of color sometimes that we have in there just because it's sort of switching it from a photo to a drawing or photo to a painting kind of effect. But we sometimes want to reduce our colors even more. We're not going to go into this greatly here, but I want to show you what to look for. So we have our image here in Photoshop and I'm going to go to Image Mode. And on Image Mode we want to look at a couple of things. It's in 16 bet, which we're going to need to change it to 8-bit. 8-bit is what's going to give you access to the filter gallery and other things. You can't use 16-bit for that. And just change the eight-bit gives us some more options for reducing the colors Image Mode. Then we're in RGB, which is fine. Rgb is, has 256 colors. It's the typical printing mode we're used to as photographers. Cmyk, cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. And this is what they use for printing houses within our printing stuff on paper or on fabric. Depending on where you get your fabric or product printed, it might require CMYK color. Lab color is often used by, while not often, but maybe it is some, some printing houses where they want a really expanded color based. This is like an, if you're thinking of it in photography terms, it's like an uncompressed color management arena. But we're going to just stick with RGB. Then because we went into 8-bit, we can have indexed color, which is the little tab that we want to open up. We have 256 colors. I'm going to select None for forced. And then what we want to do is pick how many colors you want to put this into. I don't need 256 colors. I'm going to maybe go to 12. I tried to keep it under 15. Just randomly, I'm going to pick 12. You could pick three. Actually, let's go lower. Let's just do five colors in 25 colors here, and it gives you a preview as long as you hit the Preview button. This looks way better to me now, what does it changed? If we took the preview off, you see that it has changed the color of the Lavinia missed seed pod here. It's kind of just made it go away by making it a darker green versus a brown. But this gives us the general overall shape of 11 and missed without it being too detailed. And five colors is a lot easier to manage in the end game then 256. Now, for palate, There's a couple of things you can choose. You can choose a lot of them. There's local perceptual. You can look at the preview to see if it changes its look local adaptive. If we zoom in, which is small, let me do at this point, but I usually just keep the default which is local selective in my case. And then just for options, I'm gonna leave this alone. Diffusion at 75% is the default that I have here. I'm just not really changing it. This is kind of like a giant bag of information that you could jump in here and do a lot of really advanced things. I'm not going to do that today. I tried to keep it super simple. The goal here is just to reduce the amount of colors so that it's more of a drawing type of fact versus a photo. It will still look like a photo. If you look in here. And of course we use the oil paint filter, but it just reduces the amount of business, which is just easier to print. A lot of ways. For some places, some places let you have the photo realistic look, but I like this better. Then I'm going to save this out File Save As. And I am in my my float flower folder here. And so I'll just say reduced color 11. And then this is oil paint mist. And I'm gonna make sure it's PNG. Save a copy of it. I'm not saving the original. Save because I'm making so many different variations of this love and I missed one. It would be handy to drop and drag all of these into a folder and combine them. But at this point I'm just not gonna do that. This is our beginning point. This is the beginning point. Are there other ways that we can reduce color? Yes. Are they a little less scientific? Yes. We can do things. So let's just since I've saved it, I can just go back to my history panel here and we're just going to go back to the original. And this is the original that we have. This is before I did oil paint, this is before I did anything. You could go into hue saturation here, which is an under your adjustments. And you could use a little tool next to the master sign. And you could click on a random color and you could reduce its saturation. You can change the hue of it. You can change the lightness of it, the darkness of it. You can start to reduce things with this, but it's when you're using the hue saturation adjustment. It's really more about kind of reducing the amount of colors by desaturation and that's not always the most effective. Another thing that you can do, and I'm just going to make a duplicate copy here. So I'm not messing with the original, is to go into Filter camera Raw Filter, which is Lightroom that's packaged in Photoshop basically. And we can use the Color Mixer to do some work in here as well. So we've got some orange here, which is in this part. I might want to change the hue of that to make it more green. If I move it over to the right, it just reduces the orange color, that's C. What's it doing here? Let's try two. There we go. I put this back by hitting hue or, sorry, double-clicking on the dropper, you'll see that it's kind of brown, I guess that it was in the orange range. By moving the hue slider over, That gets us closer to the greens, which reduces that. There might be some red in here. Let's see if anything that doesn't really change anything. So no, the greens I could change. I could change the saturation of it. Yellow being dominant color in the green scheme of things. I could change that as well. So I could change and reduce the amount of colors using this, but it's a lot less scientific. I like the indexed image option that we just looked at because I can say I want ten colors or I want five colors. If we look at our final file here, Let's see here, love and a mist. Whereas the one that we just did, if I open this with the preview, this is reduced color with oil paint. You can see that it's reducing amount of colors, but it still has the shading and it still works. And it's just a little bit more predictable for me and I appreciate that it makes it easier to make the pattern. I'm sure you can find other ways to reduce your colors in image. You could also vectorize this using image trace, and I'll show you how to do that over in Adobe Illustrator in the next video. 12. Creating a Random Depth Pattern: Hey everyone. In this video we're going to make a pattern with depth and this pattern will not necessarily be seamless. It's going to be a pattern that has probably thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of these little love animist flowers layered on top of each other. And it's gonna have kind of a three-dimensional feel when you look in close, but then when you zoom back, it'll just look a little bit green fabric. And it's really neat effect, but it takes a little bit of setup. So the first thing that we're gonna do is take our item here and we're going to trim it so that we can make a pattern out of it. And all you do to do the trimming part is go to Image trim. Just leave it default top-left pixel color, whatever that means. I'm not even sure, but it trims it to just bring it right into our subject and then gets rid of all the extraneous pixels. And this helps the pattern worked better. We just want a little negative space around it as possible. And as long as it's a rectangle or square or something like that, it works great. So we're just gonna leave it right there. I don't need I could save this out as a trimmed image, but I'm not going to because I have the main subject already saved. This trimming part is really just for the pattern defining. Then we're gonna go to Edit, Define Pattern. We're just going to call it Pattern 13. You could name it love and a master or whatever, but we're just going to leave it there. Hit Okay. It doesn't look like anything happened but it did. The pattern was defined. It's in the photoshops computer, it's all ready to go. Now let's open up a new document so that we can start to work with it. Here's the thing. Because this pattern may or may not be seamless. I can make it seamless at the end. It doesn't always work the best. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. So because of that, I want it to be big enough that it wouldn't have to be seamless for most applications. A lot of times in print on demand places you can zoom in, but you can't always zoom out unless you duplicate the pattern. And then it can be problematic if it isn't seamless. So it's best to have a big file. And then if you have to reduce that file size or the pixel size for a particular company or whatever. You can do that a lot easier than making things bigger. It's always easier to size down than it is to size up. Because you have to stretch pixels to make it bigger. You just sort of reduce everything and it's just easier to go down. So we're gonna start with File New. And I have some pre determined presets that I've used often on, and I'm going to choose 14 thousand pixels. And because most companies use 150 dpi, sometimes they require 300, but I could, I could reduce this, make it 300 PPI or pixels per inch, and that would reduce the pixel size. But it would still be a pretty big file. So this is a good place to be transparent background 8-bit and hit Create. This. Here's our file. Now, I want to put a color on it just for the purposes of being able to see what I'm doing. My color swatch here is like a green color. I think I'm going to pick something a little bit lighter so that I can see the a little love and a missed on top of it. We might have to change that color. You could go with blue or pink. It doesn't matter because that is always changeable later. Go to the circle at the bottom. That's half-filled, solid color. And hit Okay, then I'm going to go to the plus button and just add a whole bunch of blank layers. Grab the first link layer, and I'm going to go to Edit Fill pattern. So I'm going to cut contents pattern. We don't want the foreground or background or color, we want pattern. And then on underneath is we're gonna pick our pattern, which is the very last one. Now if I hit OK, it's going to place this pattern. And so when I'm just gonna hit OK, so you can see what happens, but we're not going to keep this. I'll show you why. Sometimes it takes awhile when the, when the file is really big like this, big in size, the pattern thing can bog down the computer a bit. And it's just something we need to deal with. Oh, I must have had just a second. Let me let me do that again. Edit, Fill. I need to turn this one off transcript off. There we go. I hit OK. It's going to dump the pattern onto the picture here. This is not good for a couple of reasons. Number one, the little mist is not a seamless pattern on its own. So when we try to view this as a pattern, it does not repeat appropriately. We have edges and it's not good. So I'm going to take View Pattern Preview off. Then just remove this BY command Z seeing it. And we're gonna try it again. Edit, Fill, script, make sure our icon or our item is picked. Random fill and then hit. Okay. Now we're gonna get another screen that's going to let us dial in some parameters for that random fill. And it's pretty easy. And I'll show you what I do. You can use as many layers as you want to do this process. I tried to keep it as few as possible. And still have it be effective. The look that I'm going forward to have it still be effective because having 300 layers is just a massive file. So the goal with this first layer is to fill in as much of the background is I can. Density is how many things are placed on the canvas. If I go down to 0.1, you can see how you see a lot of whitespace. That means that it's sort of scattered all over. I'm going to keep the density up fairly high. And then let it just, it's doing its little spinny dance there as it is rendering. And then we have minimum scale and maximum scale. Minimum scale is the smallest size that will appear, and maximum scale is the biggest size of subject that will appear. And I like to have a big maximum scale. That way you have this variety of really tiny little love animist and really big ones. Whatever your subject is, whether it's a puddle or a flower, or a heart, or a car or whatever it may be. I like to have a big thing here. If I had both of these way over here, they all would be tiny. If I move this one over here to the minimum scale to meet the maximum, it means they all will be The roughly the same size are all large. You know what I mean? Rotate pattern, color, randomness off brightness randomness. I don't usually use that much, although you could put it on. It basically means that there'll be random additions of brightness to certain repeated elements. But sometimes you can get blown out areas. So I usually leave that off. Now I hit OK. It's just going to plop whole bunch of these items onto this canvas like that. See 11 a mist is very, very wispy. It looks kind of messy, which is totally fine because we're going to separate these things out. Now because this sort of covered a lot of it. I'm going to do this again, file or edit, fill. And then I'm gonna hit okay. I might increase the density to make this, to hasten the process a little bit, we want to cover up all of the green in the background. The light green there is just telling us where hasn't, it hasn't felt. I'm going to move the maximum factor, maximum scale factor over. Let it re-calculate. Then hit Okay. Do its thing. All right, that's pretty, pretty busy. I'm gonna switch these layers because if you just look at the icons over here on the right-hand side, at the lower right, you can see that this one is much more filled in. This one. We were trying to fill up as much as we can. So I just put the more densely filled one at the bottom. I'm gonna change this color to something that I can see better because this is a fairly late subject. I'm gonna go down here too dark. Now I can see where things are peeking through. This one worked fairly well. So I'm going to use a shortcut here which is Shift F five, which brings us up shift of five. This is the time-consuming part. Unfortunately. I'm just keeping it real here. Maybe I'll make them maximum scale a little bit less. Then I'll show you another trick in case you don't want to process like this all the time and it's getting to be really slow. You can do one more thing that is also almost as random. That is a lot quicker. So let's take this layer and I'm gonna hit Command J. You can also drag it down to the plus sign to duplicate it. Command T for transform. And then if you right-click on it, you can flip it horizontally. And it fills in more. Even though it's the same file. I can Command J it again, Command T again for transformation and maybe flip it vertical. Now we've mostly filled in everything. I mean, I'm not seeing much black through here at all. I'm not seeing much of anything. I'm seeing a little bit in here, a little bit in here, but it's not enough to really cause any issue. But let's say I wanted to have a few loving and missed flowers that are a little bit bigger. I want to I want to have them a little bit bigger. Then I'm going to go to the next blank layer. Shift F6 or sorry, F5. And then I'm going to lower the density down and keep the size big. So I can put a few of the plants that are basically the whole plant on here. To sort of finish this off, I'm going to lower the density way down. Then I'm going to up the minimum scale factor, maybe down the maximum scale factor and hit Okay. We should have a smattering. I see one here. Here. It just helps to vary the size. And if I wanted to, let me take these off so you can see what that one was. This one is just a couple. So let me go to this layer and do Edit, fill. And let's just make it even bigger, even less dense. Now I have some kind of big items around the periphery there. So I'm going to turn all these back on. And you're thinking, what is she doing? This is crazy. All right, so now what we're gonna do is take our top layer. I can get rid of these other layers that I did not use. Just delete them. I'm going to double-click on this layer, which opens up the Layer Style menu. And I'm gonna go down here to Drop Shadow and click on it. And I'm going to add a drop shadow. So the drop shadow is multiply mode. If I move this over, you start to see some darkness interjected over here. What that is doing is separating the very top item from the rest of them underneath. You can play with distance, spread and size. If I go distance, that pulls it further away from the surface, if you imagine it that way of being kind of like a flat lay. It pulls it away from the surface. We don't want it to be really hanging out there and the spread changes how big that shadow area is. We wanted to kind of tucked in Twitter or subject like that. And then the size, same thing, this sort of spreads it out more. We want to keep that as reined in a little bit. Then we can go back up to our opacity slider and we can pull it back so that it's not quite so crazy. You can play with these settings like that. I will leave it there and hit OK. So now we have the effect drop shadow on these pieces. What I can do is click on it, right-click on it and say Copy Layer Style. And then I can select the rest of my layers here. And right-click and paste layer style. This sometimes takes a bit for it to show. It looks like it popped in there right away. But as you can see, it has locked up my computer a little bit. You go. You can see that it adds this depth to it. This is a little bit on the crazy side for a pattern. But if you see, well, anyway, let's zoom in here. Kind of fascinating. I would call sort of Jackson ******* kind of look because it has all of these little spindles and inspire the things. If you have something that is very bulky, like just one leaf, it can look really cool and I'll show you this with a more traditional item. But since we've been working with this love and a mist, and it's part of the lesson being that it's hard to cut out. And I wanted to do to get practicing that. This is just kind of a neat effect, but I don't know if it's the best effect for this one, but if I zoom out, you can see that it just feels very textural and green and it just has interesting depth to it. We could add more. For instance, let's say I wanted some more big pieces. Let's add another blank layer. Edit fill. I got the spinning ball, edit, fill and hit. Okay. Let's maybe increase the density to slightly. Try to anyway. If you can hear. But in the background and my fans started going and I have a pretty souped up computer. So working with such a big big computer can be a problem or big files can be a problem for just about any computer. Now, I'm going to paste the layer style that I copied already onto that one. This gives me a few more big seed head pods and everything and that just changes the overall look and I think it's fine. I don't know if I'll use this one, but I just wanted to show you. Let's try a different one. With this depth. The theme. I think it's important to see how this method works with something a little plainer than the spindle, feathery, love and MS. So let's show you with another subject that's a little bit less crazy. All right, So we do File New and we're going to just keep the same thing this time, 150 PPI, everything else is same. Same thing here. We're going to add a solid color layer at the bottom. Just so we have a color there. This is just a round one. Some blank layers. Click on the first layer. Then we're going to bring in our subject. So I have some flowers here that I cut out that I haven't really used yet. This is a calamitous. This was a calamitous that I photographed and I cut it out. And this one is unedited as far as being turned into a vector or oil paint or whatever. And this is one I think I used something from, I call Rama. I think we might, maybe I'll use that one. I'm going to right-click open with Photoshop, which will bring it over into its own layer off to the side. Eventually. Maybe I didn't hit it. I did open with Photoshop. There we go. Just take a second. Image, Trim, Edit, Define, Pattern. Okay, back to our blank document. Make sure I'm on the first layer. Let's fill the canvas. The shortcut again was Shift F5. Pick our new item. Hit. Okay. We're trying to fill the canvas, so I'm going to have pretty high density. Then we're going to make the sizes vary from being really tiny to not quite this big. Maybe like that. This gives you a preview. It's never very good preview. I'm being honest. Remember the color is just there so that we can see through to the back. And that did a pretty good job of covering a lot of it. So I'm going to click on the next layer, Shift, F5, and I'm going to keep the same settings. I'm not even going to try and do new settings. Incidentally, I really like how this looks. A person could have a beautiful texture back there, and this could be a non repeating pattern with some depth as just one random layer. I might actually let me cancel this and just save this. I'm going to choose a different color for the background. Maybe choose a dark, dark purple. I'm going to save this as a layer to play with later. File, Save a Copy. I'm going to keep this as a PDF Photoshop file. Then this is just going to put come out as purple play because I want to play with it later. That's just me remembering that I have that thing to play with later because I think this might be kind of fun. Back to the second layer that we have here. And now that it's more or less saved, Shift F5, waiting for it to finish saving down here. It's being slow. Edit, Fill. Okay. Hit Okay again because I was happy with the fill over the last one. This is just random. It might this covered the whole thing except maybe some over here. Let's do some that are smaller. Edit, fill. And then we're going to lower the density and reduce the size. Lower the density down somewhere, and reduce the maximum factor there and hit OK. This will put some smaller ones on top. That's kind of neat. Maybe I'll do one more of that. Shift of five. Maybe up the maximum scale factor just a little bit. All right, Now again, Double-click drop shadow. Let's take a peek and see if we like how the drop shadow is. It's sort of faraway and the spread is high. It a little softer because this is more of a soft pattern. Hit, Okay? Copy the Layer Style. We only have three other layers. Paste layer style. This is a lot less crazy. You know what? This is going to give you a good indicator of some problems that we can run into. This is an out-of-focus leaf, and you can tell that it's out-of-focus when it's in this pattern. Is this pattern really cool? Yes, I love this pattern. I think it's really neat. I think it could use some color adjustments a little bit. I think I need to mute the green out. But this green leaf here is just kind of noxious. I mean, there isn't a leaf on display quite heavily in any other place. To fix this problem, I'm going to sort of cut this out and just erase some of the leaf and just Command C to copy this Command, V to paste. And I'm going to go on a blank layer Command T to transform it. I'm gonna kinda cover up that crazy leaf. Then from this one, layer mask, black brush, increase the file or the size of the brush. And I'm just going to erase this leaf off as best I can. I could've done a select via color, would've worked really well. This is probably not the easiest way to do it, but it is right on top. So let's try select and mask. Let's do Select Color Range. It's doing the whole thing. So what I need to do is turn off all of these other layers. We're only working with this one little flower. That's the only one active. I can delete the rest of these because I'm not using them. All right, with that selected, let's do Select Color Range. That's not doing the best job, is it? It's always a struggle than that. Anyway, we don't have to really remove it fully because the pattern is pretty crazy. I just wanted you to see. Why would do that. Put our layers back. Still have some green on there, but honestly it's not really going to show this busy pattern. Let's add the layer style to our very top one. Paste layer style to bump it out. Which also further makes the masking job but not that noticeable. This is the another option. We have, this one which is very kind of textural. It's almost like a grass mat woven into a pattern. And this one is very floral. It looks like a flat lay from the top. And I can continue on to edit these in different ways. Like I could put a painterly effect over the top of this entire thing. I could merge it together, which is what I'd like to do any way. I like to save it as a PSD, but then also go ahead and create a stamp layer at the top. So Command Option Shift E, which is going to put a at the top again Command or Control plus Option plus Shift plus E will merge everything together and put a stamp at the very tippy top of the final pattern. And then I can save this as a PSD or I can flatten it and save it as a JPEG. But it's, it's really neat. And then I can work to shift the colors. Like for instance, I might want to go in here. Now that I have the stamp layer Filter, camera Raw Filter, if I'm finding that the green is just too much like it's just too bright. I can open this top image here and go to the yellows, which is usually what dominates green and pull little saturation out of that. The greens and pull it touches saturation on it that I could go to the purples and maybe make the kind of like that I can make the compound is more blue, more aqua, or pink. There's like a million options here. I kind of like the blue. This is probably closer to the natural color that it looks like outside. Maybe lower the saturation on that a little bit. Anyway. As you can see, first thing can play a lot, but because I didn't duplicate that layer, it's going to change my stamps layer to that. From the purple and the bright green to more of a pinky, a pinky color and the green. I wanted to show you one more thing before we move on to showing how to make it seamless. I shifted this in Adobe Camera Raw, which is Lightroom and Photoshop. And I shifted the purple over to blue and desaturated the greens, but it did reveal a problem. So if you look down here, you can see that there's a little bit of the purple background showing this is something that you don't want if you're, if you're making a pattern like this with depth and it's covering the whole thing because when the backgrounds are two sticks out like that, it looks a little bit weird because it draws attention to itself. What can a person do to make this not be that way? Because I already made this blue. I'm going to have to go ahead and do that again. But I'm gonna go back to my original, which is this pinky purple color. I have this flower here. Let me zoom out here so you can see when I turn this on and off, see that turn it on and off. Turn it back on. And I'm going to just duplicate this layer Command J. I have more than one of them. And then I'm going to drag it to where I think it is supposed to be, but I'm gonna make it underneath. I'm going to command T this and bring it over and cover up that spot with it. Then I'm going to drag this layer to the bottom. Or at least try to get it to be underneath there. So it's hiding. It's hiding under there. And it just covers up the naked spot. The spot with it empty. And that's where I dropped and drag, I drag the, this flower up here I copied underneath. That's the kind of thing that you want to mess with in order to double-check for any spots that are problematic. And you're going to want to zoom in and move it around to make sure that you don't have any wayward areas that you want to deal with. Next, I can stamp layer again, I go to the top layer that's visible, command option or Control Option Shift and E. Let it go to the top and it's sort of building the file, placing it on there. And then I'll show you how I made the blue version. I could save it out as this is my original. Then I can save it out in other color ways for other uses. Filter, camera Raw Filter. Now I'm gonna go down to Color Mixer, greens. I'm going to desaturate and lower the luminance a little bit. Then over to the color of the flower, which is like a purple. I'm going to make it more blue. I can go almost aquamarine with it, purply blue. And then I'm gonna go to the basic panel and push my whites until I started to see it clipping. There's a 100% clipped and then that's just brought back a little bit so I can do plus ten. I can also look at the blacks and move that over until they are nice and dark as well. I may or may not want to do that. I don't necessarily need to have super black blacks in this because it is a softer, more feminine pattern. In fact, I could open up the blacks and just let it be, still have depth but not be quite so punchy. It just depends on your mood. I like it better that way when you really amp up the blacks by moving them over it, it feel, I mean, I don't know if that's a different look to you could do a lot of things. Let's just even in the middle and call it a happy medium and hit. Okay. So that's another option. I could intensify the yellow I could intend because we have the blue and yellow complimentary colors going on here. Was technically T lin, like teal and orange are the blue and yellow and purple, but we're in the complimentary land here. But I could intensify the color. I could change the color of the middle using Lightroom. But anyway, I'm going to save these out. And then in the next video we're gonna show you how to make it as seamless pattern and show you some of the problems that can arise in that arena and why some patterns were better for that than others. 13. Making a Random Pattern Seamless: Alright, so let's say you wanted to Bank a seamless pattern from these two things that we did in the previous step. So let's look and see what a seamless pattern doesn't look like. Let me go to View pattern preview. We see that there are distinctive squares. And when you look closely at the overlaps, you see that things don't flow from one thing to another. If this were seamless, you would have, like this stem here would flow over and you would intertwine in a way that doesn't look like a square being repeated. So this is not a seamless pattern. Neither one of them Are. You probably can see it better on here view Pattern Preview. You can see the line where the flowers of the wall and they don't continue over this, this isn't working. We need to change this just so that, you know, I resize some of these images are both of these images from 14 thousand pixels down to 2925, which is what I use for Amazon merch. I just I just needed it smaller so that it wouldn't crash the computer while I'm recording. So I usually use this on the big sizes though. Okay, so what do you do to make it seamless? Well, you could go through a million steps and create it yourself, but I found a free version and it's called the FX box. If you go to the orange box, the-orange-box.com, they have a seamless texture generator and you can download it for Photoshop. Really, really helpful. And it has a video tutorial that tells you what it does. But basically in a nutshell, it creates a seamless pattern from your file and you can actually click the Define Pattern button. We've used Define pattern in other steps. So if you want to have the seamless pattern just generated as a pattern in that already. You can do that. There. You can create a blank square textures document in the size that you want. And then you have the option of tiling it or mirroring it. And we're going to look at both. Here is our calamitous image that in blue and the default on this is 512 pixels. I like to make it a little bit bigger. So let's just go with 1000 pixels on this Define Pattern and then hit tile. It takes a bit for it to run. I made it smaller so that it would run faster. It can get bogged down and it just like waterlogged, like it just slow. If it's a really, really big file, it goes slow even if it's a small file. But what it does is it makes a duplicates. You have a safe one on the side in case something goes wrong. And then it runs this action that goes through lots and lots of different, lots of different steps. And you see the spinning ball over here maybe. I don't know if you see that or not. But you just got to wait and be patient. What it's doing when you look at the little thumbnails down here is it's taking the different squares of each side of the design in its inverting and flipping them to try and bring a pattern to the edge that can continue and meet up with the rest of the pattern outside of the square itself. I've done this manually before with Procreate on the iPad. It's not technically difficult. It just takes awhile to do it because you have to be very precise. And quadrant your image into four separate even perfectly even quadrants. And then you have to invert and flip each side. And then you have to somehow blend in where it transitions. And you'll see that in a minute when it finishes rendering, it just takes awhile. And this is a free thing and I'm guessing it has something to do with a medium, Minecraft or gaming or something like that when people are trying to make patterns. Now, here's the original. They leave you with. This is not the tiled pattern. This is the original. And you can see that they're, all the edges are nice and crisp and clean. But when I go over to the one that seamless, now that is repeatable, you're gonna see some ghosting right here where it looks like it's not quite 100% opacity, maybe 30% opacity. That's where it's blending. The issue from. The corners meet the pattern that extends off of it when we tile it. But you can see stuff like this and it's a little bit jarring if you're looking at it up close or really big. That's one of the things that makes us more difficult is that you can see that becomes obvious when you're really close, but when you're stuffed back, it's not too bad. And then when we preview this, Let's go view pattern preview. When you zoom in on the side, you're gonna see that here's part of a petal here and it extends, and this pedal extends and it creates a nice seamless pattern, even though you do have some of that ghosting in there. Is it a huge deal? No, not really. I mean, it just depends. I tend to do kind of a painterly effect on top of this. So I might do a thin layer of Topaz impression, which is like a painterly program where I might do a thin layer of exposure software snap art, or I might use another effects box option that they have in here called let me see. When you want to bring it up, you can go to Window Extensions, effects box. There are some watercolor and painting options that I really like a lot and I might do one of those on top of it. But it does make a nice seamless pattern. Is it a repeat pattern? Yes. I mean, you can see where some of the elements, like the big flowers repeat, but technically speaking, it flows from one thing to the next, but it does have issues. We do have the original here that we can save, and then we have the one that's the seamless one, view Pattern Preview. To turn that off. I could save this out. Now, the image for this is 2925, which isn't big enough for me to save that one. So I'm going to move on to the next one. I like it bigger. If I'm going to be saving it for pattern for Hey, do VAE or a blanket or something like that. It'll have to be bigger than that and I don't want to make it bigger after the fact. So I'll just start with my bigger files and let it lumbar along for a half hour and you don't have to watch that. This one might be easier because it has so much busy-ness going on. So let's go to the seemless again. You can try the 512 pixels. It's fine. I could define the pattern. Let's just try it at default and hit tile and let it go. That's the original. Then. This is the seamless. Seamless one is the one that has the circle mask. When you see that, that's the circle mask. So we do see some of the ghosting happening, but because this is such a busy pattern, it really doesn't show all that much. You'd have to be looking for it to make it really obvious. If I go from the original two. Oops, let's see here, Here's the original and here's the seamless. If you look at the edge of the circle right here on the outside, original seamless. Original seamless. When we pattern preview it, we can get the full effect of how that works. I actually really like this. This would make a beautiful wallpaper in say, a study with big mahogany shelves. I mean, I think this would actually be a really beautiful wallpaper pattern, but there is a definite ghosting effect. So again, I would either go through and use the oil paint filter or one of the texture filters, or one of the painting filters which would make those ghosted lines more solid. We can talk about that down the road. But anyway, that's how I make the patterns. The other option, I'm going to grab one of the originals here and show you the mirror option. When we hit the mirror option, it does something different. Instead of creating an inverting and flipping the corners. It does this geometric type design, which is a mirrored pattern, which is actually quite beautiful. View Pattern Preview. Again, this would be really neat wallpaper. It's a little bit more defined as far as its pattern goes. You do see this line here. I don't know what that line is. Not technically align when you zoom in, it's not aligned, but just the way the pattern is, is working. You see more lines and circles and shapes and repeated. But it is pretty cool. I mean, I'm not gonna lie. This is probably a really neat option. And again, it might be wonderful for doing. Let me see here. This is the seamless one. Yeah. I kinda like this original one with more shapes. It seems more William Morris feeling than this one which seems kind of more intricate, but then too, bring this back to normal and undo it. I'm just going to grab all these layers and drag them to the garbage and then we're back to our original. So that is how you can turn these busy things into seamless patterns. Let's try the mirror one on this one. So let's find the original here and just do the mirror pattern and see how that works on this one. I found the original copy. Then I'm running the mirror. You see how it does distort the flowers. And it doesn't give you any control over how the final pattern looks. But again, when we do Pattern Preview, it gives us this final look and it's neat. I mean, it might work really well for a bathroom wallpaper or a handbag or something like that, I think there's a lot of potential error just you'll have to play with which one you like better. View pattern previewed, go back to our normal. That is how I do it. You could go ahead and try looking for different actions. There's also the long form ones that you can do where they'll take you step-by-step. There are ones for Procreate, which you can kind of translate to Photoshop. And there's ones for Photoshop as well. But that is how you can tile something like this. 14. Using Paint Fx and Fixing Issues: In the last lesson, we talked about some of the issues that can arise when you make a seamless pattern from the random generated depth pattern that we've done in the previous steps. One of the big ones is this ghosting that you can get where things are blending together. Basically you have transparency. Now this doesn't necessarily have to be a huge issue in a pattern like this. It's really hard to see unless you're right on top of it, you're not going to notice and likely you wouldn't even notice it anyway, just because it's such an overwhelming pattern. Now what happens if you want to minimize that effect? I have a couple of ideas. First of all, we're going to want to make a duplicate of our background layer so that we have something to work on and can go back to our original. Of course, my original is saved as well, so we wouldn't lose it anyway. But sometimes we want to blend some of the options I'm going to talk about back into the original. And so it's helpful to have that there. The first thing that I like to do is go over to alien skin exposure snap art, which is a plug-in for Photoshop that is really handy. It's kind of old. It's I've been using it since 2012 and I don't think they've had a new update on it. I mean, I think they've updated it, but they haven't changed interface or introduced new things to it. It's been snap art for this whole time. Most of this time I think I'd snap part three before that. Anyway. There are a couple of ones that I like to look at and it's the oil paint and then the stylized section. When you open up the interface, it's like any other editor. They have basic editing sliders that go with the program and are specific to a painterly look. And I'm gonna go to oil paint and then thick paint. Small brush fine. And just click on it. The presets are over here. And then I'm going to zoom into one-to-one so you can kind of see what it is and it'll start to generate as the line and the bar across the bottom goes across, it'll turn into a painting type program or painting type look, which can give the transparent areas a little bit more solid feel. If I go over here to where some transparency is, here's a whole bunch of it. And I let it generate again. You can see it's still maybe transparent, but it isn't as obvious. Here's the before, where there's obviously transparency and then after it, it just sort of blends everything together, gives it a painterly effect. That is one. Going over to the sliders, I tend to keep the brush really small photo realism as far over as I can go because that makes it look more like a photo. It's less distracting. Stroke length and curvature are just based on the preset that I chose. And that's fine. I'm going to just hit Apply and let it let it run. If we let that snap on, it just takes a bit for it to render. You can see we really, it's kept the look of the items haven't changed at all. It's just in the areas that are translucent, they appear more solid at this point. So that's before we see there's some of this random kind of see through Nas and then this looks better. This isn't your only option though. We can also do other things. So I'm gonna turn this layer off and go back to our background copy and go to Filter exposure software and snap art for and try another option that they have in there that gives a little bit more of an illustrated look. It will look different. It isn't going to look like your typical it looks now. It's going to have a completely different look, but it's something that you might want to consider. So under Stylize, they have one called many lines. And this one creates a drawing effect if I zoom in at one-to-one and again, let it snap in, you can see that it has this sort of inked effect over all of it. And it isn't painting and it certainly doesn't look like the original. But it's something different that you can play with. When you zoom back out. Maybe a one-to-two. You can see that it is quite stylized. I mean, you're not gonna have the defined shapes. It's sort of impressionistic in a way. But this could be put as a blended layer on top of the painting. So maybe in multiply mode, which we can take a peek at. But there's a white line version as well. This is pretty random. There's few lines abstract, There's one that's called detailed. Let's click on that and go back to fit. You see that it definitely looks. What's the word illustrated? I liked the many lines, one, and this isn't by any stretch of the imagination, the only set of options that you have. There are so many more in this program, but I'm just for time sake, I'm going to just hit Apply and let that do its thing. Now when we have it rendered, you can see that it looks more like a vector file. It has the hallmark of vectors with the chunks of color that are kind of all over there. And when you zoom out, it doesn't really have that appearance that it did before. It's a lot more random, a lot more abstract. But I could drag this on top of the painted layer and I could maybe blend it in, say, multiply or soft light. I mean, there's different blend modes. I'm not a fan really of how this is looking in general, I don't really like the drawing effect on this one in particular, I want to show you another one with the comatose, and I think that looks a little bit better. But this painted effect doesn't look a whole. This is a snap art for the top when I turn it off, this is the original and then this is what the snap art. They are very similar and yet the snap Art painted one helps it to feel a little bit less. Well, it just looks more solid and less transparent and places. Okay, so that's an option going over two. Sorry, going over to the chromatin. Here's our original. Let me see if I have the options here. So I did these in advance so that you wouldn't have to wait for it to render. This is the original one with some transparency here. When I add the snap art fine brush, one that I just did with the other option with the love and a mask. You can see that it adds texture and it just solidifies and makes it a little bit more solid. So this is without the snap art, you can see the transparency and the overlay with a snap art painting. It just sort of evens everything out a little bit better for a pattern that you're going to maybe stand in front of, say, wallpaper. And then here is the snap art drawn option. Here I have it at multiply at 55%. This is a normal, which for a kid's room or kitchen or something like that, this could work if you like that illustrated look, it could be fine. Multiply above the original dark and intense one. You could lower the opacity. But then again, you're dealing with the transparency issue. And this is over the painted layer. So these are just some options that helps too. We'll just bring together the effect in a little bit less of a, I don't know. It looks less like you have a layer mask with a lowered opacity, so those are some options for you. One of the last things I wanted to tell you is that if you choose something like this and definitely check the pattern preview to make sure that the effect that you've applied still remains seamless and doesn't introduce new problems. So go to View pattern preview and then scroll over to a corner area and the pattern preview and zoom in and make sure that you don't see any straight lines or weird artifacts or anything that tells you that this isn't working and you can actually click the layers off to check this is the painted layer. This is looking good. No matter what I do. That's our original, seamless with the painted layer and with the snap art. Many lines sort of illustrated option. Like I said, these aren't the only options you can play with the program. There are a lot of other options that you can play with that would work. But this depth with the pattern with a single element that's repeated. These are the options for making it look pretty cool. Now the last one that I wanted to talk to you about is one of my favorites, but it's also one of the slowest running ones. So I actually am going to stop this video. Keep the original here. This is my original and turn off the pattern preview. I'm going to stop the video and come back when this action has run. And it's one from FFP Xbox that I really like. If you go back into the effects box, window extensions go into FX box in the home nesting area, not the seamless pattern, but one called real paint FX. I am going to do this one and I love it, but it is massive. It is the most mind-bogglingly slow program, especially on a file this huge, if you have a square, a repeated square that's maybe 3 thousand pixels. It works great and it's fast. But on 14 thousand pixels at 150 DPI or PPI, it can be really slow. So like I said, I'll be right back. Thank you and I'll see you on the other side. Alright. The paint FX action or whatever it is, ran for about 15 minutes. It took a long time for this to run. It's a big program and it takes forever, especially when I have lots of stuff going on on my computer. So just keep that in mind. Having a fast computer with a lot of extra RAM is very helpful. Let's look at the final. Affect what this does is it has probably hundreds of layers and it gives the effect of a painting. Now, here let me show you how I tweak it. What I like to do is take off the extra textures layer. There's choices in here, you can click on different ones. And these were like surface textures that go on top of the whole thing as a whole and they tend to have grungy effects or broken wall texture is one of them here. Old Canvas. I tend to not use those, so I tend to click them off. Then I just look in, zoom in all the way and then I'm looking at the structure here. So this is one of those areas that had the see-through petals and see-through leaves. Then I just start to open the panels up, the paint edges. I'll just open that up. And I click them on and off to see if one makes a difference versus another. Like, I don't know if I like small brush edges on medium brush edges. I like that one off too. Small paint edges I like. I don't mind that one. Big paint edges. That might be too much. So you can just kinda go through and customize that. And then I can close out that window. That layer is grouping when it's done. Then there's brush drop, there are brushed drops, darker splatters, and turn those on and off. White splatters. I can turn those on and off. They're not quite as visible because it's just, it gets lost in this, in this pattern. What else do they have? They have a place here where you can reveal back the original. So if you look at this red highlighted layer, you can use a white brush and you can paint back the photo from underneath. So for instance, if for whatever reason I wanted to bring back the photo here, I can use a white brush, grab my brush tool. You can look bigger. And I can go in and it will reveal the original painting or sorry, photo underneath or whatever I had started with. I started with an already stylized image. So that's what I would get when I use that. Another place that this reveal a back section can come in super handy when you're trying to make the seamless pattern work. Now, it was seamless before, but now that we did the painter layer, we might have some issues and sometimes I do and sometimes they don't. If I go up here, let me just make this a little bigger. And I'm gonna focus on this corner. If I go to View Pattern Preview, we zoom in. You can see that there is a little bit of a line that's happening in some places like this one looks fine. It looks okay here. Well, it looks okay here, but not right here. You see there's a little bit of a line that's happening. We don't want that to be that way. Otherwise, it just, it looks very bad in a print to have these obvious square marks. In this one when we're zoomed out at 34%, it isn't really too bad. It's not looking terrible hoops. But when you zoom in quite a bit, it can start to show up. And I don't know if anybody would actually see this with the naked eye in a print, but we don't want to take any chances. So how can we fix this? Well, this is where they reveal back is a big helper. I'm gonna take off the pattern preview and just reveal our painting here. And I'm gonna grab the brush. Do about 30%. So I can do that with the three key or I can change it to 40%. I think 30% should be fine. Make my brush a little bit bigger. And I'm going to just gently go along the edge with this brush. You will see not much there because it is just very much on the edge. But if I just go along the edge here and reveal back the original picture, It's really kind of hard to see. So if I went to 100%, say, let's just do a 100%. I can go along here. And what this is doing is it's removing the painting effect from along the edge itself. Going back to the original, I'm not gonna do the whole thing, but I might do the entire corner here. Maybe right here. Like this. What will just go along? Why would you want to do this? Well, you'll see we're trying to make the transition a little bit softer. So let's look at the pattern preview. Go to the far corner. Zoom in. This is softening that effect. I don't know if I actually hit on the area in particular. You have to go all the way around to do a good job of this. So I get I didn't hit it. Pattern Preview. Let's just be really obvious with it will go into a 100% and we'll just zoom along the edge here. You'd want to be more careful than this and not do it at 100%. Maybe 30. Or if your pattern is such that you can tell exactly where the problems are coming in. You can do that too. You can see around the editor is a little bit of a frame, view Pattern Preview. Go the corner of our blue box. When we zoom out, you can see that the transition is fixed. There isn't any line there anymore. So we've essentially removed the the painting aspect of it right along the very edge where it meets. And there's still a little bit of it right here, like you can see let me see if I can use my right here. Apparently I just didn't catch it with the brush tool, so I'd have to go back and make sure I get the entire perimeter, but the line extended from here all the way through here and I take care of most of it. It shouldn't be perceptible to the naked eye. What I did, but I just missed a little spots. So that is where you can make this painterly effect repeat well across the whole thing and have it be completely seamless. So then you can just, when you get it all fixed up, you can do the pattern preview check again to double-check. But I would just continue on my merry way with the brush and maybe just go in and be careful to catch the whole edge all the way around until I'm satisfied that I don't have any lines showing. That is how you do that. All right. Thanks, everyone. See you in the next video. 15. Painterly Seamless Random Depth Pattern: In this video, we're going to go over how to create a random depth pattern with multiple images. In the prior, the prior videos we covered how to use a single element, in this case calamitous and Lavender Mist bud. Now we're going to do multiple ones. This will not be a seamless tile pattern. I'm not gonna go into doing the adjustments to make it available. We're just going to make a very large pattern with a seamless depth. And if you want to make it seamless later, you can follow the tutorials in other videos in this class. All right, so we're going to start by opening up a file. In this case, I'm going to start with a fairly big file. Let's go 14 thousand by 300 ppi. The transparent background. The reason I'm starting with such a huge file, if I wanted to use this resulting pattern in a big print on-demand projects like a king size do, which is something I like to print on incontinent fabric. Having a big enough size where I don't have to make it tie level is helpful. It does make a huge file size, but you can also make it smaller and then make your pattern tile level by doing one of the many ways of going about that, either using an offset filter and painting or using the plug-in that I've mentioned, the FX box with the seamless tile pattern, whatever works for you. But in this case I'm just going to keep it back. Alright, so what elements are we going to use? That's the key here. We want to define those patterns so that we can add them to this piece. So I have a couple of things up here. Let me close out of these two what we're going to use this I wanted to do at home far pattern. It's helpful to have an element that doesn't have a stem on it. Because stems do. They build up and they can look punchy, I guess for lack of a better term. Then I want a one that has a lot of flour and a little bit of stems. I think I'm going to choose these two. I'm going to open these in Photoshop. I'm going to define each as their own pattern. We're going to go to edit, define pattern. Hit, Okay. Go to the next one, Edit and Define Pattern. And hit. Okay. These can be found in the patterns window. We've mentioned that in the beginning of the class, you can go to Window and hit patterns. And if I dock it up here, you can see the whole thing. At the bottom. You will find the two that I just added. Those are ready to go, but we're not just going to be adding them as a tile. We want that to be a random depth pattern. So we're going to use our shortcut here, which is a shift F5, which brings up our filter menu. You can also go Edit Fill. If you want. Instead of foregone color, we're going to go with pattern and activate that. Now, we're going to use the script for Random Fill and we want to choose our pattern. So the first one is this echinacea. And before I do that, well actually it's like Okay, we'll just go ahead and do it and hit Okay. Now, we've talked about the density minimum scale factor and all of that. I want to just adjust these a little bit. This looks actually pretty good, so I'll hit Okay. And let it go. It takes a second to generate when you're working with such a big file. And go over to our layers panel. Now I can add a couple of blank layers. I want to keep a blank layer underneath so I can add a background color if I need to. This is pretty intense, but we're gonna go with it because this is for demonstration purposes. You're welcome to lower the density and do multiple layers. You could do 20 layers with just a few on each. It's really up to you, but we're just going to keep it simple this time. The next layer, I'm going to go edit, fill. And then I'm going to choose a different pattern. Again, I'm on a different layer now and hit Okay. We'll just keep the same ratios, they're the same slider amounts. Now you can see how the green stems really come into play here and they start to overwhelm the image. So I'm gonna pull those down underneath. I think I'm going to do on the top layer here a few of them, but lower density and maybe, maybe bigger size. Again, the shortcut is Shift F5. We're going to go with this one again, but I'm going to change the parameters a little bit here. Let's lower the density and maybe make some that are smaller and bring down the maximum scale factor. Remember this preview is never gonna be super accurate, so you're just gonna have to play. Those are kind of small. I think I'm going to actually lower the density again. I'm going to just undo it and try again. Shift at five and hit Okay, and I'm gonna go with maybe bigger size. Make the minimum scale factor pretty big. But I'm gonna lower the density a lot. There's just a few. Density is the amount or the how many we're adding. That's working. Okay, Now let's just do another layer like that. I could also go ahead and just copy and rotate that. Alright, now I'm going to maybe bring one of these behind. I think that's fine. Okay, So now I'm gonna do another one of those kinds of layers. So you can see it's really the same as doing just a single element. In this case, we're just mixing up different elements. So we'll do this one on Edit Fill. Go back to our single without a stem and you can see why having ones that don't have a stem are a little bit easier. These are big, so I think I'm going to lower the size and increase the density. Maybe put that underneath. Maybe, yeah, I think this works. So we've got a random pattern happening. There is still a little bit of space coming through here. You can always change the color of the background layer if you want to go ahead and see any gaps that you might have. But I was just going to commit command. Lost my microphone there for a second command J gets in the way of my keyboard. And command J, Command T, and then rotate 90 degrees. And that pretty much fills up all of the space that we have. And I think I might have this new, I think that's okay. Alright, We're good. I have multiple kinds. You can then go ahead and rearrange these layers if you want. So if I wanted to pull that on top, pull it behind. Always give yourself a chance to play and see which thing looks best to you. You can always rotate things by hitting Command T. If you want to rotate things to change their perspective or their orientation. I think I want to rotate this one counterclockwise. So I'm going to command T 90 degrees counterclockwise, or maybe go around one more time. I'm just going to go around until I can get them upright. Now let's create the depth to this pattern where we just go ahead and add our drop shadow, the drop shadow behind it. And play with the multiply mode. Let me turn this off so I can zoom in. It's helpful to see closer. We can see it under there. I don't want the distance too far. I'm going to bring it closer. I don't want the spread so far increase there. That looks better to me. I wanted to have depth but not be so far away from the main subject. Now I can just copy this copy layer style. Click on the next one that hasn't been done. And then shift click to select all, and then paste layer style. And it will add it to the whole thing. As you've seen before, we can change the color of the shadow layer if you want. You don't have to use a shadow layer at all. If you don't want to. Sometimes having it just to feel like a jumble and sort of vary. I don't know what the word is. Very chaotic can be good. I personally though, appreciate the one that has fewer stems going on, and I also do see some dark areas back here. What I could do is grab a color and then go down here to the bottom, add a solid color layer which has already been picked. And this can fill in some of the blank areas. I like this, but I think the green is just too much, so I'm actually going to. Take that one off. I think. Go to the top, add an extra layer and I think I'm gonna do another one with smaller green. I'm going to choose the one that has the stem. But this time I'm going to lower the density and then have it just be relatively small. So I'm very small, minimum size, pretty small, maximum size. I feel like the green is overwhelming. Everything that's too small. Always a challenge to get. Everything to feel like you want it to. I wish the preview was a little bit more helpful. Yeah, it's just it's not working for me. Let's say you just don't like it and you want to try a different element. Well, let's go back to our elements and see if there's one that might work better. Maybe this one here, which has the top, Let's open this. Open it with Photoshop here. I think I'm gonna like this one better because it doesn't have any stems. Let's edit define pattern. You can also go to the patterns menu and hit the plus button, and then go back to our layer. It's finder or working layer, a blank layer. Now that we have it defined in our pattern, we can choose it. Hit. Okay? And maybe we'll go big with this. Maybe a little bit bigger hit. Okay? I think this is gonna be better because it has a little bit less of the crazy. Takes awhile. Just the nature of the beast working on such a big file. That might be a few, too many of them. I'm going to do that again. Let's go and lower the density a little bit. Alright, That's better. Now we can just right-click and copy or paste layer style, which we've already done. Now we have, have that. Now what I can do is you can save this as a very large PSD. In my case right here, I'm just going to merge this. I want to kind of bring the colors and closer together. We've got a lot of colors happening. And I could leave it at this. I could do, do painterly style on top of it. Any number of things that we've covered that we'll cover in other videos. Many of the things that we cover in this class are covering multiple times and sometimes at nauseum, very repetitive. So if you miss something, don't worry, we'll come back to it. One of the things I could do is to use the Adobe Camera Raw Filter as a filter to adjust the colors. So Filter Camera Raw filter, this is basically Lightroom over here in Photoshop. I just want to pull some of these colors and get them a little bit closer together. Perhaps pull a little bit of saturation out of the oranges. Just meet that down a little bit. Maybe take my pinks and move them more toward the pink side. This is purple echinacea, so I don't want it to go too crazy with it. But just a little bit pinker. Yeah. Just a little bit pinker than they were let's see, pull out some yellow saturation. I don't know, actually like the yellow saturation come to think of it. It's all an organic process and you're not going to love every single thing that you make with this type of process. Let me go. With that. They feel disjointed to me like little, little paper cutouts. As I do in many, many different videos, I might use a filter. Let's go to Topaz studio and give that a go for what it's worth. I decided altogether I didn't like the stems in there. I like the different flower heads. So if I were to make this for myself, I'd probably start all the way over with just those two elements and continue on. But it's important for me that you see the organic workflow and how you work through things ebb and flow, if you will. Let's go add a filter. And I'm gonna use impression that run. Yeah, that works a lot better for me. It just softens everything I could go through and try different different options I haven't even masked with any of the settings underneath. Just stay with the first one. Scroll down and I might pull the smudge over a little bit more. Except remember, patterns are things that people see in movement. And it took me a long time to get over the idea that I need to have everything be so pristine and perfectly photo-realistic. Because when you look at patterns in real life, they're not, they're often not completely photorealistic. I think I'm gonna go to curves. I think I want to just sort of mute out. We meet it out a little bit, maybe brighten it up a tad. Give it a little bit of a matte finish. I feel like I wanted more pastel, which initially I didn't really want. I know I went and had added all those shadows. And now I'm kind of going against myself, changing all that and removing the shadows, but it feels more feminine and light and more like a blouse perhaps that a person could wear, liking that a little better. All of this is a dance as with everything that I teach, there's always this ebb and flow and I like this a lot better. I could even mute this out a little bit or I could do a lot of things, but I'm gonna stop here. But this is the general process of using multiples. It's the same as using one, but it's a very organic process and play, a lot of playing and kind of figuring out what you want to do with it. I know I said I wasn't going to try to make this a seamless pattern, but I'm going to stamp the layer which is Command Option, Shift and E. For Mac. You have to look up and see how to make a stamp layer for PC is, I don't remember at the moment. But let's do our plugin. Let's do Window Extensions, effects box. And I'm just gonna give it a go with this one. We'll just use it the settings that they have. I'm curious what it's gonna do. I'm just curious if it will blend somewhat, as you've noticed in maybe prior videos and you'll notice in future videos, more painterly styles lend themselves to correction for seamless repeats. Then having say, the original that we had where it was very crisp and clean and looked like little paper cutouts. It is truly seamless. That works pretty slick. 16. Cutting Out Zinnias + Organizing : In this video, I want to show you how I'm going to prep some zinnias for a Xenia pattern. I've showed you before how I cut things out, but I wanted to just do it again in order to show the workflow flow a little simplified and little faster. I've started with this first Xinye that I have in my catalog. I just check things for basic focus. And this one looks fairly decent. You can see that it's quite warm. So I usually take my white balance eyedropper tool and go and set it on that. I like my things a little bit warmer, so I do add back a little bit of that warmth because I liked that ombre effect that's happening with Xinye. Next thing I do is I go to my crop tool and I want to remove any extraneous white that I can. It just helps the program in Photoshop decide what to remove later. Remember, we're not going for a pretty crop or just trying to cut it out. So it doesn't really matter if it doesn't look that great. The next thing I'd like to do is increase my whites as much as I can. And I keep my highlight warning on it because I want to be able to know if my subject is starting to blow out. It doesn't show that it's blowing out here, but I can see it with my eyes and it's not looking so hot. So I bring it back to just below the area where the subject itself starts to look with just too bright. You can check by zooming in. Does anything look like it's losing detail? Bring it back a little bit more. Right-click edit in Photoshop. I could also adjust the colors at this point, but I don't like to adjust the colors individually. I like to do them as a batch so that everything that's going to go and see the same pattern is uniform. So I won't worry about it now, I will likely adjust the colors on the completed pattern. So then I go to select, and in this case I have no pure white in my subject itself. So I'm gonna do color range, and it does an excellent job. This is the default that it chose, and I don't see anything anywhere, so I'm gonna hit okay. Now, I don't, I'm not exactly sure I said objects selection or object objects subtract. So what it's doing is it's subtracting this flower from the scene. I don't really want that. I want to invert it because right now it's selected the white. You see the marching ants around the outside. That tells you that it's selecting the background versus your subject. Making sure that I have my selection tool picked the little square here. It also might be the Quick Selection Tool or the magic wand, but in this case it's the object selection tool that we want to have highlighted. I'm going to right-click Select Inverse, and now it is selected my Xenia and not the background. Right-click again, Layer via Copy. If I turn off the background layer, you can see that I have my selection. In order to check to see if it did a good job, I'm going to make my color swatches black on top, white on the bottom. And then click on the bottom layer. Go down to this, the adjustment menu and hit solid color. This tells me that I have made a pretty good selection. Of course, there are some little blemishes and things that are on the xenia. This was an older one that I picked. It had been blooming for a little bit. I hadn't been up to my flower farm for a couple of days. And so I went up to deadhead everything and this one had been blooming for a couple of days, probably didn't got pelted by the reins, but that's okay. I liked the ombre color and it's looking good. I can delete the color layer and I can actually delete the background layer if I want, but I'm just going to leave this and save it. File, save a copy. The reason I choose Save a Copy is Photoshop just did an update and it forces you to save a copy if you want to save a PNG. Let me show you one other thing too that I like to turn on. If for whatever reason, every time I open up my Photoshop, it goes ahead and change the settings back to what it had before. They don't stick. I want to go to Photoshop Preferences and then file handling. I want to not save as is to the Save As to the original folder. I want it to save in the folder that I'm working in. If I save it to the original folder, then I have to read navigate back to where I want to save it. So I like to click this off and hit Okay. Now when I go to file, either save a copy or save as it should remember, the place where I was before, which was flowers. Now I want to do the drop-down menu and choose PNG. And now I'm going to rename it. And this is Queen line Xenia. Because this is a series with a lot of them. I'm gonna do a new folder, call this queen Lyme. There's clean line, Red, Queen, lime, orange, queen lime, blush, I think. But I'm just do Queen lime. And then save this to that folder. I'm not sure why it is having trouble saving it. It says there's no such directory, which is very weird because it's their flowers. Go to clean line. Hit Save. Not sure what the problem was there. Sometimes Photoshop has a mind of its own and it isn't always a mind that is working well. Then I'm going to continue on back to Lightroom and go into my next image. I like to zoom out and take a peek. So I've already done this one. You can tell that it's well, that's been made brighter. Let's go look at my file folder here. Here is the queen lime orange that I pulled out. I can drop and drag this one into that folder that I just made. Let's bring it down here. My clean line folder, where did it go? It's at the bottom. Way at the bottom. If you're gonna be doing a lot of cutouts, it really helps to group things into folders. For instance, as we're looking here, I have a lot of these Sarah Bernhardt roses or sorry, Sarah Bernhardt peonies. I could do a new folder and call them Sarah. Oops, my microphone. That's why I can't type my microphone is in the way and I don't always line up on my keyboard, right? When I don't look down to see where the j is. Sarah B, peony. Now I can grab all of these peonies that are sarah be peonies. Sarah Bernhardt. I can drop and drag them into the folder. And this helps to clean up my folder without it being quite some messy. I like to separate things by date created because I can find them again. A lot of times things are all over the place and it can just be difficult. I also went and cut out a whole bunch of other things named charlotte Rose. And I can drop and drag my Charlotte roses into the folder as well. And then clean up by kind date. But I like to keep my folders at the top because that's usually what I'm working in. Oops, there's one stray share, Sarah Bernhardt. They can go in there. Anyway, that is how I cut things out and we're going to continue on working with the zinnias in this phi. Oops, that was the wrong button. I'm going to go through and cut out the rest of these India's anything that looks unusual. I like to go through and do different directions. So for this one here, It's straight ahead, which is great. I'll probably skip a couple of these now this one's kind of tilted to the side, so I'll brighten that and cut that one out. This one, I used a different lighting scheme. I have a smaller Westcott flags one foot by one foot right here that I was actually holding it closer to. So we've a little bit more of a defined light shaped pattern on this one. I might cut that out. This one had kind of a different flower, had a spiral going on, so I might cut that one out. And again, more of the ombre shape of the different blossom. I'm gonna go through, cut out half a dozen of them or so, and I'll be back in the next video. We can assemble and work on our pattern. 17. Reviewing Complicated Cuts Outs: As I was continuing on to cut out my Xinye pieces, I found that some of them were not cutting out as well as others. So I wanted to again, just to review how to cut out things that don't don't produce clean cutouts right away. I'm over here in Photoshop after I did my preliminary steps. And I'm just going to go into Select, select and mask. I could also use select background color, which is what our color range, and select the background color, which I did before. But I found sometimes when there's a shadow on the background, it doesn't work as well. So I just go ahead and use the select and mask and then select subject. Now it didn't do the greatest job. When we zoom in here we see we have a little white things between the petals and the stem was not included. What I'd like to do is go over to the selected mask tool over here, which is called actually the objects selection tool. And then I want to make sure that I'm double-checking to see what the mask is actually selecting. I don't have Object Subtract on, so it's selecting the subject. It's not subtracting the subject. That's good. That means I want to add to my mask, white on white is adding to the mask. Black on white is removing from the mask. I take my lasso tool and I'm just going to go around my stem really loosely. And if it doesn't do a good job, we'll just do it again because it's so different from the background. It really not having that bad of a time figuring it out. But we want to do that. Then I like to go up to the second brush, which is the Refine Edge brush tool, which I find works the best for flower petals. It's a little bit like cutting out hair. It's looking for the divots of the background that are coming through. Truth be told this doesn't work as well as it does here. If you have a busy background, if I was trying to cut this out from, say, the garden and would not work as well because it would be green behind it possibly, and that would just be really confusing. Now I want to zoom in. I see a bunch of pink. I don't want that. So I'm gonna go back to the select tool and then I'm going to go add to selection. I want to add back things. This is pink color here. I can make it more intense and you can see it better. This red pink here is part of the flower. I want to add that back in. I don't want to add back in the places that or not petals. So I have to be careful because there was quite a bit that it that my selection messed up. You can see that even as I keep going, it doesn't do the best job. We can. Actually go in and use more tools like the Lasso tool is a little bit more like, it's like what we want to add to selection. So whatever I collect in the Lasso tool is going to become part of my selection and it's not very refined. It's not looking for the edges. It's just kind of like a, like a like a hammer going in here and picking it. So because of that, I want to go back to the Refine Edge brush tool when I can and make it a little smaller. Go around this lot of times size of the brush can make a difference right now I have the size. I had the size pretty big before. It was it was selecting things. It shouldn't. Back to the Lasso tool and add to the selection. I'm going to go through all these pink areas. And again, remember this is like the hammer is just going to put in whatever I select. And it has no No smart level about it. It's just, it's just picking. So let's go back to Object Selection and then add to mask and try this lasso tool, which should better understand the edges. And it does. Now if I didn't take care of all of this in advance, if I just did my selection and then went into Photoshop, we would see that a whole bunch of this flower was not selected properly. And it would show, and we'd have to go back and fix it somehow after the fact. It doesn't always work like a champ. A lot of times it does. But a lot of times we have to go in and fix things. Does it have to be perfect? It really doesn't. For a lot of reasons. I am going to be doing an effect in Eichler Rama, which will make this more not a vector, but it's gonna make it more of an illustration is still hole, has a lot of detail, but truth be told. I like to use a lot of these painterly effects because it takes care of some of this tedious work. It makes maybe not the best selection ever work, okay. But as you can see, it really did select it removed from the selection all the tips of the petals, which is not what we want. I can go along this edge. It just takes a little bit. Now I can go back in with my Refine Edge tool and make it smaller. And I can be a little bit more judicious with its use. And go up into the little nooks and crannies to add to remove the white from the mask from our subject. With a smaller brush. You can sometimes remedy things by rerunning over it. Got some pink there. It just use the Lasso tool or the Lasso tool is good when you have stuff, you know, you just want to remove all of it. Maybe grab the Refine Edge brush tool here again and just run it along the edge of my stem. There is a little pink in there. It's literally removing part of that stem. There we go. Oops, went too far. I'd like to say that all selections are super easy and wonderful, but really some of them just stumped the program for whatever reason. Now I'm gonna go smoothing just a couple of points that helps to tighten up the edges in any jaggedness and then hit OK. And I've got the crop tool on there. So let's do the selection tool. You can't do right-click Save As or Save a Copy or do anything until you have the selection tool selected. If I was on the crop tool, so it didn't work. Now I can do Layer via Copy, turn off my background layer and I should be good. And I can always, again double-check by adding a solid color behind it to take a peek and see if my selection is okay and it is. Then File, Save a Copy. And if photoshop remembers which it does, I can go ahead and choose a PNG. I'm not going to bother to rename it because I have my own folder structure and hit Okay. I just wanted to throw that in there because sometimes your tooling along and you're cutting things out, you're like, Whoa, this one is not working. So I just wanted to remind everybody of some ways to tackle that. Alright. See you in the next video. 18. iColorama and Instant Alpha (Mac): Now that I have all of my zinnias cutout, I want to determine what sort of pattern I want to make and how I want it to look. As we've talked about in the class already, we can do a multi-layered random pattern that covered the whole thing. Or we can do a pattern that has the zinnias placed and then a solid background or a textured background. There's lots of different options. For this one. I think the first thing I want to do is a multilayered pattern that has a couple of, at least a couple of the different varieties in here. As you can see, I've got a couple of different colors. We have this salmon color which is really quite vibrant that I cut out. This is not a queen line. This is actually probably some other random kind of ended up in the bed, but it was in the green line bed. This is more indicative of the kind that we have there. What I want to do is pick different shapes, not all of them, but just a few that represent. And this is the first one that I did. That one's nice and clean. There is. This one is kind of neat because it has a spiral shape, so I might choose that one. What I'm gonna do is I need to preprocess these in, I call Rama. So the next step is to choose the ones I want to AirDrop to myself, to my phone or my iPad. Then I'm going to run, I call Rama coherence number four and probably lower the opacity a little bit. It's Eichler AMA style coherence number four. I do have, like I said, at whole eye color on my course in my membership area, if you're interested in learning the idiosyncrasies of that program is a lot. But I'm going to just go ahead and pick a couple of different shapes here. I like this one on the side and this one, and I think that pretty much represents the shapes that I want to for this pattern. Then I can go ahead and go to AirDrop. And I'm just going to turn on my iPad. And when I do that, it says iPad and I'm just going to send them over there and then work on cutting them out and I'll catch you back here. After that. After I processed the flowers in Eichler Rama and I airdrop them back to my computer. I still have one more thing to do before I can start to assemble the pattern. The first thing I need to look at on all of them is to make sure that my PNGs are okay if there were any stray pixels or anything that wasn't removed when I went and did the tracing type effect that I get with the coherence, which gives him an illustrated vector type look, which I love. There is a little bit of stray randomness around the edges. And you can see that if I double-click on some of the ones that I know I didn't do the best job on. On a Mac. Preview will show any stray pixels that are in here that are causing problems. And sometimes it's hard to tell if it's dirt on the screen. I think this one is actually okay, but let's just double-check. Here I am in preview on a Mac, you'll have to use a different method if you're on a PC, but if you have a Mac, they have something called, if you open up the toolbar, instant Alpha, which will help you remove any white or any background. So if I drag and click, whoops, I didn't want to do that. I don't know why I did that. Let's see. I'm choosing the wrong tool. It didn't snap to it. There we go, incident alpha. What it does is it selects the background and I can hit the Delete key and then it just gets any random pixels off this one didn't have any to speak of. If I did, it would ask me if I wanted to save this as a PNG, if it was a JPEG or something else, but these are already PNG, so I can just click out of it and it saves that. I'm just going to open up each one and go to the incident alpha and just double-check if everything looks cool and there isn't any problem, then I just close it out right away. I know at least one of these heads some issues. So let's see which one it is. This one. This one has some stray pixels down here. Do you see those? Kind of I don't know. They just look like a mess. Like a little bit of a smudge perhaps. I can go in here and grab it. Like like this is likely the area that was the tabletop on my studio versus the backdrop. And it had some smudges like dirt and whatnot on it. So I'm just going through making sure that all the pixels, if I go too far, it'll select the image itself. I'm just trying to keep it just on the background and get rid of any stray pixels. These likely aren't going to show up in my, in my design. But they can see there's just a stray pixels everywhere. When I, when I click and drag and nothing else comes up, then we know we've got it. It doesn't have to be super perfect because well, there's a level. But I think this is mostly done. So we're gonna say, okay, open that one up. This one was cleaning, I think. Check this one. I see there's some stray pixels. Access them straight pixel action going on down there. Incident alpha. See you, that's where the stem used to be. It's kinda seeing the shadow of the stem used to be. I'm not really sure what the deal is up here, but there's some stray pixels as well. Anyway, that's pretty clean. Here's the final one. I think this one's clean as well. Yeah. It's getting a little bit of like some random stray pixels on the side, but not too bad. So we're gonna say, okay, Alright, now that I've prepped all of them now they're ready to go. When I clicked out of them, they just saved that incident alpha setting. I didn't have to re-save it or anything. Let's open all of these in Photoshop. I'm just going to select them open with Photoshop that we have them all in here. Now I need to work on creating my pattern and I'll just do that in the next video. 19. Zinna Polka Dot Pattern: Now what I'd like to do is create a polka dot pattern using two different Xenia versions. To do this, It's really simple. There's just a little complication as to how big you want the polka dots to appear and how small or inner hospital. So let's get jump right in. I'm going to eliminate the FX box over here because we're not going to be using that for this lesson. I need to pick out the polka dot options. This one which I like, this one. We won't use that one. And this one, I thought we'd use this one and possibly one of these two. Maybe this one and this one. What we're gonna do is just we're going to copy and paste those over to our document and get started. So in order to make a polka dot pattern, basically we have to make the swatch that has the polka dots on it, but it's gonna be rather small. And then we'll duplicate that over whatever surface we want to put the polka dots to be on. We're going to go File New and determine what size we want our polka dot swatch to be. I'm gonna just go ahead and do a 2 thousand pixels we could use, but let's just use 600 pixels with transparent background at 240 resolution. It is a pretty small swatch. Now, we're going to need some guides to put down here in order to fit it onto here just in the right way. In order to do that, we want to go to View, Show Rulers, view, snap to guides, and make sure our guides are on show. You could do Show grid, but we're just going to have the guides on. What we're gonna do is grab our little tool here, which is just magnifying glass. You want to most over the top of the ruler and drag it down and it will snap to the middle. Then I want to do the same thing from the other side, drag it over and have it snap to the metal. You want the snap to guides on in order for that to work. And the reason being you don't want wonky polka dots. All right, so let's pick our item out here. I'm just going to use Control or Command C to copy it. You could also go to Edit Copy. Go back to our little swatch edit paste. Or you can do Command V and then Command T to transform. Now this is a really big flower and a small swatch. So that's why I said I could make a much bigger swatch. But for the fact that most polka dots are going to be repeated at nauseum a lot. We don't need to have super big files. But you could if you want you want us to just snap this end and you know, it snap to the center when you see the pink lines, pink on the vertical and pink on the horizontal. Now what we want to do is we're going to divide this up and to move the, the image here into four quadrants into the corners, we're going to go to Filter Other Offset. Now we know that this square is 600 pixels, so we're going to want to put in half of that for each of these parameters, three hundred and three hundred. And hit. Okay. Now we have this Xinye divided up into four quarters moved off to each edge. And now I can put another one in the middle. That's how we can choose to. I'm going to grab this one. I'm just going to Control or Command C. Go back to my swatch command V. Now of course it's huge, so I need to resize it. I could make a giant polka dot thing, but I don't think I'm gonna be making a billboard of a polka dot pattern. Usually this is something that I put in the background, but this might be something special. Then I think I need to determine how big I want the polka dot pattern to be. If I hit OK here and then I go to View pattern preview, I can see what my polka dot pattern to look like. They're, they're very even. Both of the zinnias are about the same size. This would work as a traditional polka dot pattern, but I could also make it smaller. I could do Command T, and I can make this a smaller polka dot and go in and make sure it snaps to pink and then I can zoom out. So that would give a little variation to the pattern. I could go even bigger with it and make it bigger than the one on the edge. Actually just looks the same like that and that fills in more spot and what more of the area with less whitespace. This is where you just have to decide what is it you want to do. And I think what I'm gonna do is just kind of go over the top of this and make them similar sized. Just haven't been even snapped to the middle and then turn off Pattern Preview. I have to hit Transform first. That is our polka dot swatch. You don't have to leave it like that. I could put other things in here if I had leaves of the xenia, but I want to keep it super simple. And so what I'm gonna do is just save this as a PSD file, save a copy in my patterns folder. So these are my elements. I'm going to go to my patterns folder and find my queen lines in your pattern. And I'm going to put in here polka dot with two zinnias. Then I'm gonna save it as a PSD, which is a Photoshop file. Then I can also save this as a PNG file, save a copy. Then it PNG here. And I'm just going to just hit Save and not rename it just for time sake. So that is how I can make a wonderful polka dot pattern. And if I want to go ahead and add a background to it, I can just go to the background layer here. And my color swatches That's pick a background color. I'm looking for something kind of pinky. Maybe it will go later with it. Then add solid color. View, Pattern Preview. Maybe I want, I don't want it to be that dark. Maybe I can go lighter. I could go darker. I could also go in here and grab different colors. I could do the lime green. That would be very fitting for Queen lime Xinye, but that's pretty, pretty garish. I mean, if you wanted to have a super fun color pop pattern, I could make the pink pop, I couldn't make the the yellows pop. It could be kind of a wild like diaper bags of color. I could clean up the xin yet lime color and make it a little bit more lime light. Anyway, there's lots of choices that we can make. Also this deep burgundy, there's a deep burgundy color here. Let me, let me turn this off. If we go in here, there's this deep purple color, which might be pretty. That would be an interesting pattern. I could do many different colors. So that is the polka dot pattern. Now let's say that we've settled on this as our pattern. We'd like this background color, we like everything, but this is a swatch. This is something that can be duplicated and millions of times to create a polka dot pattern. But it isn't a finished, bigger swatch that we could apply to something, say in a print on demand place. What I want to do is go make a defined pattern and then fill up a bigger area that's more feasible for sharing in different places. One of the things that you can do, and this is a trick I haven't talked about yet is to convert this to a smart object. Smart object just means that whatever you have tucked inside this special smart object box can be re-opened later by Shift and clicking and selecting all of these layers I can right-click and click Convert to Smart Object. What this means is again, I can just double-click on this thing on the lower right corner and it reopens my pattern to the layers that I had before. And then when I'm done with it, I can hit Enter and it will put it back together into this Smart Object. Not right now. We're gonna do it on it. There we go. Now we're back to a smart object. So why would I want to do that? Well, I might want to edit the layers later. I did save it as a PSD, so I have it. But I didn't save it with this color in the background, which maybe I should do is as another, another thing. So just do save as a copy. I'm going to save this as a Photoshop file. And we'll save it like that. That way I have it as a backup copy. Just in case. Convert this to a smart object. And now let's continue on. I want to make a pattern from this edit. Edit, define pattern. I'm going to call this polka dot. Except I might microphones and awaken. There we go. Hit, Okay, now I can make a new size. Let's go new. And my traditional size that I do for print on demand and a lot of places is 10 thousand pixels. This is gonna make a tiny pattern, but I just want to show you what I mean. Let's just go ahead and hit that and then I can do Edit Fill. Choose my pattern. Hit, Okay. There is my polka dot pattern. It's kind of making my eyes go crazy. But I can zoom in here and I can see each of my cute little zinnias. And seriously, it's like an optical illusion. I feel like they're moving. As I look at the screen, you can see that it's kind of I like it because on my print on demand sites I can make it bigger. Let's say I'm doing a clock or a cell phone case. I can zoom in to have lots of detail or if it's an address, I can have it bumped back out. But that's one option. So I can do File, Save a Copy. Png is usually what I do and I will call this ten thousand, ten thousand PX version and hit Save. Hit. Okay. I can undo that File New. Let's go to 2595, which is one that I do for Amazon merch, create, edit, fill. My pattern has already selected. And so there we go. This would be better for just having bigger polka dots. There's a lot of idiosyncrasies when it comes to places. How big your pattern is scaled on an item is going to determine how you want to export your file. But let's say you have a print on demand place. It says you're gonna make a do Bay and it's gonna be king size. And you need to have 15 thousand pixels on the long side. Well then you can play in here with the Edit Fill and figure out how big you want that pattern to be on that space that you're allotted. Like if I went in here and started did File New and created a 15 thousand square inch. Sorry, I have one here that's really close. 14 thousand. This is my typical DO DO bay size. If I go in here and do edit fill with the pattern, it's going to be super tiny. Now I might want this on a duvet. I might not want to have giant big polka dots on my Du Bei. But let's say Did. What am I going to do? Well, I can take my original pattern here, my original swatch, and I can start with a bigger swatch. Now, I'm only made this 600 pixels. In order to increase its size, I would have to use a blow-up program, which I've talked about in another video. But or I'd have to make it bigger to start. I didn't think I would ever want to make giant polka dots on something. So I made it small 600 pixel file. But if I wanted to do something bigger, let me go ahead and, and just re-size or make one that's bigger from this file. So file, save a copy and I'm just going to flatten this. I have my swatch, but I'm going to do it as a PNG. That's my swatch open with Photoshop. Filter blowup three, Let's try that one. There's also gigapixel image I showed in another video as well. Let's make this a thousand. Now I'm going to Edit, Define Pattern. And I believe this was my 14 thousand pixel one. We're going to go edit, fill, grab our defined pattern that's a little bit bigger. And hit Okay. Now my polka dots are a little bit bigger. If I went to 2 thousand, they would be even bigger yet. You can shifted and just how big the pattern is going to be on your file, by how big your swatches versus how big your whole file is. And you kind of have to get a sweet spot if you use something like Illustrator or you can scale patterns and shift patterns around. But a lot of printing places also let you scale patterns like Spoonflower. So if you just have the original swatch, you can go ahead and repeat it and choose your scale in advance some places let the customer determine how big it is, but it can be a problem if you're not careful. So I'm just going to save this one out. Let's see how it looks as he is nice and nice and sharp. This is zoomed into 220 something percent. At a 100%, it looks really good, but it's still feels like it's moving to me. I'm gonna save and see. Let me save this one. This is my Amazon Merch size. I'm going to File export, Save a Copy. And I'm going to call this one merch 2925. Save it as a PNG hit. Okay. That's kind of how I worked through it. I'm sure there's a more refined way, but in Photoshop I haven't found it. You really have to dial in those parameters of how big you want your pattern to be on, the size of the file that you create and then you have to work with it. One of the things I should mention at this point is that the resulting files that we've been creating are not duplicated patterns. They don't work in. But as replicated patterns, they're not the swatch anymore. They are a filled area with our swatch. For instance, if I go to View Pattern Preview on this one that I did for Amazon merch. It is not a duplicated pattern. If we zoom in here, we see that it's not meeting up because it's not meant to. This is filling the pattern in an area, but it's not duplicated. If I go back to the swatch that I created, that was a little bit bigger. This is the image, this might be the 1000 pixel one. If I go to View and pattern preview this one of course is going to duplicate just fine. It's not going to when I fill the areas. If I'm going to be using button for a particular company, I have to make sure that I size everything the way I want it to be so that it fits over the pattern or fits over the item template or whatever I'm doing. But it's not in repeat. I can't repeat it in the program. And the reason I say that is like Redbubble, I can go ahead and put in a swatch and tell it to repeat this many times through a spider. Not all the places are like that. But it does determine what you're uploading. If you're going to make a, essentially a piece of fabric like in this case, this might be my duvet. And I'm going to upload this to art aware or society or Redbubble or whatever and, or shower curtain. But this is not gonna be repeatable on their program on their website. It's just a standalone piece for that product and I'm not gonna be able to adjust the size in their website. So just keep that in mind. Always have your swatches because that is where the magic happens. All of this is just exported for the specific purpose that I have. Swatches, rock. 20. Creating a Zinna Motif: I wanted to show you something else that you can do with your cutouts that you make and that is making a motif. I'm not gonna go into the lengthy process of creating this, but this is from the pieces that we cut out earlier with the Xinye polka dot process, and then I paired it with a rose leaf. All the leaves you see here are just simply one rose leaf. And I can show you that if I go back to my patterns and my cutouts and go into leaves, I have a random little rose leaf here that I added to the stack. And if you go through and look, you can see that I have just various sizes of these in years and they're just plopped on. And then behind them I stacked leaves at the bottom of the stack. So if I put them at the top, place them where I want and then I drag them to the bottom so that they're behind whatever I put them on top of. And you just keep adding until you fill the square. This is the key. I have a 10 thousand pixel square that I just did File New and I just did my traditional 10 thousand pixels at 240. Maybe I didn't. Let me just double-check. I could be lying. Now this is 2925. That's not very big. So I actually might bump this up in, blow up or gigapixel because I like this and I think I might actually use it as a print versus just a pattern. But you can use this as a pattern and I will show you how. But I just wanted to just mention that this is nothing complicated. It's just all the little pieces. It's 12345 zinnias. And then I remove the stem from this one so I can have some random little heads floating. Then this one with the long stem I just tucked behind things. So really, really simple. You just keep building until it feels like it looks good to you. And then you save it out instantly. My husband came in when I was making this. He's like, I don't really like that, That's boring. And I said, Well, would it help to have a background behind it? And he's like, Sure, Let's see what it looks like. And I said What color and he said blue. And I was like, Okay, Well, it makes sense because he's completely a primary color person. Give him the eight color box of crayons, not the 64. He likes the bright colors. I added like a navy blue and I was like, Wow, it looks kind of like a Swedish print or something. It's really happy. And as far as color theory goes and it just visually really interesting. I think I might put this on Instagram just to show what I've been up to. But anyway, just building it really simply. And this is where your creativity as a photographer can come in your use of light and balance and color theory and all those things can come into play. That is what I did. But let's talk about making a pattern. I'm gonna take off the background layers because I don't want to use that as part of the pattern-making just yet because I have some work to do, we need to add some things to it. Once we make this as seamless pattern, it's already seamless. But if you look at the pattern preview, you're going to have these very distinct squares, which is not what we want. We need to offset this. I'm going to turn that off. And then just so I'm all set up, I want to make sure I have a PNG saved in my files. I'm going to go to my folder and just take a peek at this PNG to make sure that it's the completed one and it is. So I'm going to open this one up. Basically, I'm just opening up a duplicate, leaving my original alone. We're going to use the offset filter on this duplicate copy. We're gonna go to Filter Other Offset. But first we need to figure out what the size of our image. It's Image, Image Size, Canvas by mistake, but the same thing, it's 10 thousand pixels. So I blew this up, I went into blow up and I made it a little bit bigger. Actually a lot bigger. Because I realized I might want to use this as a standalone. So I should have thought of that in the beginning and made my motif bigger but live and learn. So let's go to Filter Other Offset, 95 thousand pixels at the top and 5 thousand at the bottom, half and half. This is my motif broken up. And you can see that there are some spaces. So we're going to want to add a few little pieces in here to top it off. So I'm gonna go back to my other motif and just grab some pieces. Let's grab something that's kind of big. Let's see, let's grab this one command C over to this one Command V to paste. Now, it's not that big because you know what, I actually think I'm going to use the originals. Because if I go ahead and use the ones that are smaller and have been reduced in size, they're not gonna be as good. So let's just drop and drag these in. Blank layers. If something to drag them into drag this one in. That what else do we drag in here? Because I can't tuck it behind. I could tuck it behind actually because that's the bat bottom layer is still a PNG. So let's maybe drag this one in. Oops, that's not the one I wanted to use though. That's a vector I did before we need a different one. Did I use undo? Thank goodness for undo. This is the one I want. The I Colorado one. Go like, I don't know, maybe right here. That looks good. Command J, Command T, add one over here. Maybe kind of overlap this leaf a little bit. I don't know, we'll just tuck it in. Their composition and balance are so key in all of this, sort of messed up my motif, but I'm making it a seamless motif. Now. I really like, Let's do this one. I'm going to tuck it behind by dragging it. Let's tuck it behind this big orange one there. And we'll drag it to the bottom and make it any light there we go. Swing it up a little bit. So what else? It's like I need something through here. What do you guys think? That's the workshop. You don't have a lot of this guy. Maybe the spiral one. Put that one in there. Oops, I've got in the back. Bring it forward. I didn't know that's a different one. Maybe we'll just do some little scattered ones. When in doubt. Just make little scattered options. Flip around, fill in the holes. If you like. It's just repeated too much right there though. Like I need something with different color right here. I'm not liking that one. Stick something onto someone. I could do this. Let me show you this option. Make this kind of small. We're just going to kind of have it stick out. I don't know how I feel about that. I feel like it feels like it's a jaunty angle that doesn't quite work. Plus there's one just like it right there. Maybe if I go this direction with it, but then there's one right there that's just like it. One of the things you need to remember when it comes to patterns is people don't study the patterns. You know, they have them on things. And the goal is to have a pattern not jump in your face and have you go, oh, this is a pattern that looks like such and such. And people don't pick up a pattern and study it unless you're a pattern person, then if you're like me, you're paying close attention to it. But that's not so much the case for the average person. If you just don't want anything to draw undue attention to itself negatively. Still need something right there. I wonder if I should go behind with like a big specimen. Bumping back up to the top here, I could, I could overlap something. Maybe this one could go behind. Let's drag it behind and see what it looks like if we tuck it kinda in the middle of things, those leaves over the top of it. I don't mind that so much. Still have this big gap here and a gap here. Anyway, that's how you continue the motif. You just keep adding and adding. I'm not going to bother you to watch the whole process, but this is the thinking I'm gonna have to mull about this one a little bit to figure out how I want to fill up the spaces. But that is how you make a full seamless pattern. So you Pattern Preview. You can see it full scaled back and wow, this big one really draws attention to itself because it's so large. Part of me thinks that it needs to be broken up a bit by having something overlapping it. In the same list version, in the motif version that we started with. The one that's more like a photograph that you might want to print. This one here. With this, I like it the scale and the balance, but in the seamless, it's overpowering. I think I might have to overlap it with something or maybe put leaves coming out somewhere overlapping and I'll have to think about it. But this is yeah, it's getting kind of overwhelming with that. Anyway. That is what I've been working on and I'll see you in the next pattern. 21. Long Form Complete Client Edit: A long-form video where we go over a client request where someone wanted a screaming yellow and orange pattern, that was her words. And we're gonna go over choosing elements, reducing colors randomly or with two elements, making patterns seamless, which can be a bit difficult. Processing the whole thing in snap art using pattern preview and then hand fixing the edges with paint and clone in a long form way so you can see how I do it in real-time. And then we're going to hack it with the offset filter. So that is what we're gonna be covering in this video. It's a longer video. You can skip around if you want, but this is just the whole process for working through and then catch the next video where we do some color modifications. The pattern can be used in a more neutral way. All right, thanks. Hey everyone. In this video what I'm going to go over is how I make a random scattered pattern seamless using our FX box seamless pattern generator at the end. It's a specific request from a client who wanted a screaming yellow and orange pattern. I think they just like really bright colors and bold colors. So I'm going to deliver a few different options for them. I'm going to give them the scatter pattern of yellow and orange. I'm going to straight up and then I'm going to give them a painterly version where I run it through, likely the FX box real paint effects program. Then I'm going to do a more of a place to pattern, which will show you how to do later either with this setup or another one. The elements that I'm gonna be working with today are this puppy, or I'm gonna be working with this puppy and this daily. And both of these were taken in my garden and I process them in Eichler Rama in the coherence. Setting. Number four, if you have eye color AMA on your iPad, you can go ahead and do that as well. I didn't really reduce the opacity much. I find that this helps to reduce the colors and that just makes it easier for the final print. It, it sort of forces the color space into a smaller place. Usually just helpful. And so I don't have to do the pre color management thing where I go into mode and indexed color and reduce it. I mean, just for kicks, we could go ahead and try it and see what this does with this one. Let's just do like seven colors and none for forced. We can see with the preview that it doesn't really change a whole lot. Take the preview off. It's a little bit flatter. It was seven colors. Let's see what happens when I do like ten colors. Preview on and off. It doesn't really change a whole lot. How about 1515 is pretty much the max that you can do for some fabric printing. In this case, the 15 doesn't really change it that much. So like I said, I think I'm just going to keep it actually. Well, 15 might be too high with this one image because we have the yellow one to do as well. So I went to was changed my mind Let's go to let's go to maybe six. That virtually looks the same, so I'm gonna hit Okay. And then on this one, Let's do the same thing, image, mode, index, color. And I'm gonna change the color on this one a little bit six is little bit low. Let's try 710. I don't know what's going to bring back a 11515. I mean, it just brings it into a really neutral place where the colors are very similar. And when you turned off the preview, you can see that there's the brown and the depth and the green, and I like that. So I'm going to just undo that by Command Z. And I'm going to undo this by Command Z. And as well, this is a thought process. I mean, if I was going to make this into a pattern on fabric, I would definitely take it into Adobe Illustrator and do the image trace in color and that would reduce the colors. It would also vectorize the whole thing and just make it look more like an illustration. And then I would also be reducing the color palette at that time as well. That's another option. But let's just jump into finishing this pattern. The first thing I want to do is get rid of the stem. And I could duplicate the layer, but I don't know if I'm gonna save this icon without the stem. So I'm just gonna go grab my research tool. And we're just going to zoom in here and get rid of it. I have the original saved with a stem and it only takes a couple of seconds to remove it. So not a big deal. Image, trim, hit. Okay, and then we're gonna go edit, define pattern, hit. Okay. Actually, let me crop this. I'm going to do unconstrained crop because I'm gonna get rid of this bit here. They're likely could be some little stray pixels from the stem that's causing that edit define pattern. Now back to the yellow. I think what I wanted to do with this one is to enhance the color a little bit. So I'm going to go into Filter, camera Raw Filter. And I'm gonna make it a bit warmer. Again, this is processed in Eichler AMA using the coherence number for color mixer yellow. And I'm going to warm it up a little bit and maybe increase the lightness quite far, the luminance a little bit. I just wanted to be a little bit bolder and brighter because she wanted bold and bright. Because this has already cropped. I don't have to do much with it. So edit, define, pattern, hit. Okay, and now let's make our new document. So at this point I wanted to share another thing. When we're making a new document for a pattern, we have lots of options. We can have a custom size, it's really huge. We can have it be smaller. This is the size I use for Amazon merch. This is a size I use for red bubble. But the thing is, is sometimes you want to not have files that are so massive because you end up with just huge files or it makes the actions that you're running take forever. If you're constrained in that way, there are options and I'm gonna do another video next about that. But for this case, we're just going to be traditional. I'm gonna just do my 10 thousand pixels at 240 with transparent. But if your computer just can't handle that, if you're working on a small laptop or you don't have a lot of RAM and you're running into problems, especially if you're running these painterly programs. It's possible to do them on smaller sizes and then enlarge them. So don't panic if you can't make huge, huge files. My computer groans and complains at 14,300 DPI or PPI for sure. And so I'm pretty excited that I can maybe get there. You starting with a much smaller file, like a 2000s pixel file, and then get it to 4 thousand. And again, that's the next video. Let us grab this and create it. This is going to be the random pattern. So I'm gonna grab out a bunch of layers to play with. And as far as background color goes, I don't think I really need one because I am not going to be leaving any background exposed in this case. Let us get started. The first thing I want to do is make sure I'm on my bottom layer. The shortcut again is Shift F five, and it also can be edit or file edit. Let's see what does it. Edit fill is the other way, but I use Shift F5 as my shortcut, which is like the default shortcut. I'm going to find my pattern, which is the second little puppy here. Then, now I hit, okay, too soon, I didn't hit script. So now we get this repeat pattern and that is not what I want. So let's do it again. And this time I'm going to hit Script random fill. Remember when we do random felt, we're gonna get to put in the parameters in the next, next step. I'm gonna have my density kind of mid to low. And then minimum scale factor is tiny. Maximum scale factor is high. Rotate pattern is turned on and these two are turned off. Color randomness and color brightness, or color randomness and brightness randomness. I turn those off. This one is helpful sometimes, but it can blow out your highlights and then there's nothing you can do about it. You just have to read you the layers. So I leave that off and do it manually and hit Okay. Remember at anytime if you need a background layer, you can just drop and drag one of these to the bottom. I can make this a color layer if I want it to be. Because this is the bottom layer here. One of the things I can do remember, you've seen me do this before, is I can go on this and just do Command J, Command T or Control T. And I can rotate it, rotate it 90 degrees. And that is basically duplicating. I am duplicating that layer. And if I wanted to do that again, I can go Command J. Command J hopes, but I have to turn off the transform command J Command T. I can rotate 90 degrees again. Alright, so I'm starting to fill it in, but remember we're using two elements in this pattern, so we want to make sure we're integrating those. I'm going to drag it up here and put some space between my layers and on the blank layers here, I'm going to do the yellow ones. So let's do that again. Command F5. And in this case we're gonna do the daily hit. Okay? My parameters are pretty good. I might turn down the maximum scale factor because it is a bigger file. That's going to tuck those in-between so you hardly see them. Let's do it again up here. Shift F5, maybe make the maximum scale a little bigger. She didn't say bold. And these would be bold. Now above the poppy layer shift of five. Hit, Okay. All right, so this is starting to encroach a bit on. Well, it's fine. But now what I'm gonna do is do some smaller ones that can scatter on top as well as fill in the back here. I might grab this layer at the bottom and I'm just going to duplicate it. So I still have a blank one at the bottom in case I want to put a color there. I'm going to just put some pieces in right here to cover up the blank spaces. So let's grab our puppy or our daily. This was fine. I'm going to copy it. You can do Edit, Copy. Go back here, edit, paste Command V. Now it's hard to see because it's underneath all those layers at the bottom. But if I do Command T or control T, I can see it. And I can just tuck it in here. I can make it bigger. I can move it around. We're just covering up that blank spot. Now if I want to make sure that I don't have any gaps in the back behind here. I can put a dark color. Let's maybe put black behind it. So let's just leave it at the very bottom layer and do solid color layer and hit Okay, Do I see black coming through? There's a little black right there. Little black right here. It's not terrible, but those would be transparent pixels. If I don't put a background color on background layer, I need to cover those up. What I'm gonna do is go to this next blank layer and we'll grab the puppy this time. Edit, copy, edit paste, Command T. So I know where it's located and I just gonna go cover up that one. And then Command J to copy it, Command T to move it, and we're going to cover it up over there. Now, do we have anything else that's black? Do we see any black anywhere other than the anthers on the day, Lilly? I'm not seeing anything. This is pretty big and bold, very bold pattern. Now I'm going to do a couple of smaller throes of the pattern. So the same thing again, Shift F5. And this time, instead of doing the fill that I've been doing, I'm gonna do it really small like lower density. And then a smaller scale. Maybe the same size scale. We want like some big bold ones, but just not as many. And hit Okay. Then, then we're gonna do on with the puppy as well. Welcome to voice old. Oops, whatsover speaks. I didn't want to do that. I hit Command F5 instead of Shift F5. So that's what happens when you hit the wrong shortcut back to our puppy and hit Okay. All right, so this is pretty big and bold. This might have too many. I think there might be just too much orange. I'm going to turn that layer off, go to the next blank layer. Do Shift F5 again, and this time I'm going to make them the density smaller and the maximum size smaller. And hit Okay. I like that better. There is this one just sort of floating here in the middle of nowhere. Let's maybe Command J, that layer, and then Command T that layer. And then let's rotate it. Maybe 180. I don't know why it's not fully in the square. That's kind of weird. R-squares and fitting. Let's just delete that layer. Let me just tell you it's easier to delete it then to try to line it up sometimes. Let's see if that one is, is that way as well command T. That one is weird too. Don't know what happened there. Let's just try another couple of blank layers. Shift F5. Much better, going all the way to the corners. Now I like that. And we'll just Command J that to duplicate it. Command T to transform and then maybe 180 to turn it around. I like that better. And then we'll do one layer of the day, Lillian on top here of the top Shift F5, grab our daily. Let's do smaller ones, lower density. That looks pretty good. Now I can kind of decide if I want to put a star flower. Now remember, I'm gonna make this seamless, so it's going to be kind of messed up a little bit. So I think what I'm gonna do at this point is add my depth and then I'm going to make it seamless. And then I might put a few of the items on top to mask any areas that are translucent as you've seen in previous steps. So I'm going to merge all these layers. Then. I'm going to, oops, I don't want to merge them. Yeah, It's what am I doing? Sorry, I need to do my depth layer. So double-click on the top layer and then hit drop shadow. We'll see if we can see what happened there. Do you see it? Let me turn off the preview. We saw kinda see it over here a little bit. If I make it darker, you can see how it really makes it pop. Then the distance, this makes it go out a lot more. This is how far away from the surface it is if it was like a flat lay. And then the spread is kind of how tight and define the shadow is we went, we want it soft so we're going to bring it in a little bit. Hit Okay, copy this layer, so copy the Layer Style by right-clicking. And then select all of our other active layers that have things happening to them. I don't know if that one has anything on it or not. And we're going to paste the Layer Style, the light Lily, your style. And then it takes a while for it to render. Everything pops out. Nice three-dimensional, exciting pattern. Now we want to merge it. Right-clicking. Trying to merge the visible. I could go ahead and flatten this too if I wanted to. I'm not going to save it. I liked the randomness of it. I'm not going to try to repeat it exactly. I could just go ahead and flatten this too. But it does need a daily that's fully on the top. The only ones that are fully on the top are small. And so I'd like to have a bold daily at the top, but I'm going to add that later. This is one of those reasons why having a smaller, smaller file is helpful. Now remember when you flatten an image, it's going to turn it, turn the background. They are not. It isn't going to be a PNG anymore. It isn't going to have a transparent background anymore. If this were something where you could see the background layer that was transparent when I flattened, it would make it a solid white background or whatever color I had. It's important to keep that in mind. I don't need the transparency factor for this, so we're not going to worry about it. All right, Let's make this seamless, but first I'm going to save it, save a copy. I'm going to go into my patterns. And because she said screaming yellow and orange, that was her words that she wanted a screaming yellow and orange pattern. This is the not seamless original. I am not very good with my names. Like you can have a more regimented naming system if that works for you. But for me, as long as I have the parent folder with the name of the file, I can find all the ones that go with it inside of it. If I'm searching. Alright, let's make it seamless. I'm going to use this action again. This is a 10 thousand pixel file I like to do. I mean, I could do the 512 is it doesn't really matter. You're gonna get those transparents pixels see-through everywhere. Let's just do the default, will just do the default and hit Okay, and see what happens. It might have the transparent pixels more toward the center and I can cover them up with a puppy or two, or a daily or two. Alright, so this is the original and this is the seamless. So let's see what we've got going on here. If I take this and I do the pattern preview, if everything is correct, we should see that all of the lie that there aren't any lines, that there's nothing. That you can see that is looking not seamless. It, it does a good job. But we do have some transparent pixels and things. We're not gonna be able to remedy all of that, but we can get an idea of what our pattern looks like. Zoomed back and you see how if I did this as a ditsy pattern where I printed it really, really tiny on the fabric. Size-wise that it just looks like a happy yellow and orange pattern. It's when I zoom in, you can start to see all of the amazing detail. Let's turn that off. Because I think this did a pretty good job. I'm just going to flatten it. Image Layer button. Now as long as I don't go too close to the edge, I can add some more of the details in here of the items. Here we've got a mass going on where we've got some anthers mixing with the daily. It actually looks kind of cool. I mean, it, it's not terrible. You can just sort of see the difference when you go from the original to this one. You can sort of see how they change. We're just going to add some things over the most obvious places. Let's grab our daily Command C. You can also do edit copy and go back to our seamless and Command V to paste. It just showed up right there. Command T to transform. I can move this over the top of some of the transparent pixels. Now remember I had my layer style copied. So if I paste layer style, it should add the shadow right underneath it. Let's look in here and see if there's anything else. There's a transparent bit here that's kind of annoying. There's a line. You're gonna find them all around the perimeter of the 512 pixels. But whatever, it's totally cool. So let's just do Command C, command V to paste that command T to transform it. We'll just put it over the top of anything that's problematic. We can also turn it. I can flip it vertical. A little different, as long as I don't hit the side where the, where the repeat happens, it's gonna be fine. And then I can add the layer style to that. I'm not going to try to get too close here. I think I could stand to have small daily right here. So I'm going to go back up to my daily layer command J Command T, which just duplicates everything. You can see it over here. I'm going to flip it horizontal. Maybe flip it vertical. Reduce the size with the little handles. And then zoom in here and see where do I want to put it like that, because I already had the layer style on it. I don't have to go ahead and do that again. What should I put here another daily? Let's take our layer command J Command T. I hit Command T. There we go. There we go. Now it's copied. Let's do a 180 degree rotation. Maybe we'll make it smaller. Just pop it on top there. You see how we can just continue on our merry way looking for any spots that look like this is particularly messy here. We have a lot of weirdness. What can I put over the top of that? I could pet a puppy. I could put a daily looking at the whole composition. I think it should be a daily. I'm gonna just take the same one. Command J Command T. Maybe do at 90 degrees this time. Make it a little bigger. You can continue to play like that, and it just fills it in. And then to double-check, we want to make sure that we're still fine and we are because I know I didn't touch the edge. But if you get into the like, if you have some other translucent stuff, it's hitting the very edge like this. It will be repeated in the pattern and you will see the transparency there. But you run, you run the risk of having it be a little bit problematic if you'd start to go towards the edge. One of the things I can do is actually work on this pattern preview. So let's do that right now. Here we have some transparency. Let's say I want to put a day Lilly on top of that. I'm going to Command J, Command T, which takes this here. And I can technically, now, while I'm in Pattern Preview, I can put this on the top and hit return. And as long as I save everything and merge it, it will be crossing the line and covering that transparency up. Really, really, well, and it will stick and it will be seamless. Let's go out of learning emerges altogether. Merge visible, then turn off pattern preview. As you can see, that daily that I just put on top there is there and the top of it is at the bottom. It is now a seamless pattern with that transparency covered, pretty slick. Again, when I zoom way out, It's just a simple ditsy pattern with lots of flowers. When I zoom in, you can see that it's just really rich with pattern. So this is super fun. I love it. I think she'll like it too, because this is definitely a happy pattern. So File, Save a Copy. And I'm going to call this seamless. Maybe I'll do screaming orange, just so that I have it saved and hit. Okay. Now if I want to do any more adjustments, if I want to make it even wilder and more exciting, I can go Command J and Filter, camera Raw Filter. You can use any adjustments at that you have in Photoshop as well. I'm just really well-versed in Lightroom and I like to use that. So this is Lightroom and Photoshop. Basically, I'm looking at my histogram. I can push the whites a little bit more. I can push the blacks more if I wanted to, make it super bright. I can push the vibrance over that starts to get encroach on the blacks there. Make it super vibrant. Not usually for like, really, really bright colors like this. But it's cool. So I'm gonna say that just as it is. I'm going to over, just put seamless on this. Do a JPEG which I have to do, save a copy again, and it will replace it. There is our really exciting happy pattern. Now, I'm going to flatten this and try to do something else with it. The next thing I want to do is make this painterly. And there are several options I could go ahead and use the flexbox option. If I go to Window Extensions, FX box, the original painting program that I like a lot is the real pain of x. It makes huge files though. And if I go to my original folder here with my patterns, look at the last one that I did. If we look at this size of the file, It's like 33 megabytes, so it's not huge, but because it's 10 thousand pixels, it can take awhile to do the effects box. And that is a problem because it can crash my computer. It often does. And I want to show you a couple of other things that I can do. I'm gonna make a duplicate layer for this one. And I like to use exposure software, snap art, which is from used to be alien skin. Now it's exposure. And they have the snap our option. You can make a more stylized pattern, the one that by default that comes out because I use it a lot, is many lines. And it's down here under Stylize. And this makes a completely new file, completely new file. It reduces the color space, it makes it so that you can print it on fabric. I love that because it forces it into a new color space and it forces it not into new color space. It forces the colors into a reduced colors color amount. And because it basically becomes an illustration, you can use it for fabric and it mostly stay seamless. This is a problem sometimes when I save this out, I have to be absolutely a 100% positive sure that it retains its seamless nature. Because once I take this out of this program and bring it back into Photoshop, if I don't bother to check to make sure it still seamless, it may not be. And I might need to do some cloning on the edges are painting on the edges to make it truly seamless. Again, if the program has done something to it that I'm not aware of. This is one option, white lines is another option. This is even more abstract. There's few lines here which is definitely more vectorized in appearance. And then there's abstract, I like these. There's also oil paint, which is more of a painted type effect. And if I zoom in one-to-one, you'll see it once it renders, there'll be a bar that'll come across as it, as it loads. This is another option that I really like as well. Like that. It looks more photographic stone, but it has some texture to it. It has some brushstrokes on it. You can play with all of the different settings over here and make different effects. But in this case, I think what I'm gonna do is just go with many lines. You can change the pen color. Let me zoom back out here. You can change the pen color. If I wanted the pen color to be a bright orange, I can go ahead and change that. I'd have to have my does not give you here. Let me grab this foreground background color. This puts orange lines around it. You can see on the daily, you'll see the orange lines pop in. If you don't want to have the black lines, I tend to like the black lines just because when well, I like I like both. But I like the black lines because most people with clothing, they have something black to go with it. And so having the shadow area and the black lines just fits, it makes IT function well. But you can B do it gray, a deep gray, a charcoal. You can also do fat strokes or tapered strokes. I kind of like the tapered stroke. So let me zoom in. There's lots of customization. And I like this because it isn't his photographic. And it can be printed easier on traditional fabric versus the photo. Realistic kind of effect that we were working with. This is the tapered strokes, this is the wavy strokes. These are a little busier. I think the tapered strokes are a little bit less busy. Which I appreciate. Then they have two effects here. Well, actually I have the number of lines. You can reduce the number of lines, the pen width, you can make it more bold or less bold. I like it less bold. Then they have a line pen style effect and line flexibility. I will leave those alone, but you could definitely play with them. This is kind of has the 70s vibe to it. I like it. I think I might go more mustard with the dailies if I really wanted to get that seventies feel I love, I love 70s color palettes. But I can play with the number of lines. So like if you didn't want it to be quite so line, you can reduce the number or increase them. That looks good to me. So I'm gonna hit OK, apply. And this will put a new layer at the top with that effect. Now you can blend the two back together, the original and the line drawing. However, depends on what the output is. If you have a photographic output like you're gonna print this as a print, then where did it go? It's still rendering. If you're gonna do this as a photo print on photo paper for the wall. You can go ahead and do whatever you want because you have unlimited while you have 256 colors to play with, at least depending on your printing house and online. But for fabric, you're going to want to make sure that you're squishing it down to the amount from what I hear from the fabric people 15 is like the max colors that you can have in a design. And that's why you've got to be cognizant of it. What I would do is just research your final destination for your artwork. For instance, if I'm going to print something with Spoonflower, which is a fabric place, they will say that they want the files to be a certain size. It has to be 150 dpi, it needs to be an RGB. You know, those are the things that you have to kind of think about. What you're in it just like printing at a printing house. If I'm doing White House took a custom color or if I'm doing pro DPI or if I'm doing Miller's, there are little idiosyncrasies of how they print and how it's going to look best. You just want to make sure that you're catering to the place that you're printing. And then getting test prints done to make sure that it looks good and that you like how it looks. When thing about fabric. And when you're wearing fabric, remember it's like it's not a static thing when you're looking at a photo on the wall, It's static, it's not moving. You can move around and look at it from different angles with clothing, it's draping, it's hitting the light in different ways. And so the amount of detail that you might have in a photo print and when it gets onto fabric, it can sometimes feel like just too much when there's so much animation when it comes to fabric. Now if it's a Duce or a towel or something that's just sort of static when you're looking at it. It would be there all sorts of variables. So think about this is the super stylized pattern. Now we want to double-check this again to make sure that it's truly seamless and I'm just waiting for the spinning ball. This is pretty taxing on your computer as you've seen me struggle and I have been playing with different ways to make smaller files and then blow them up literally into file sizes that I need. That's one of the problems that you'll find, is you have to have a certain size of a file for certain outputs. So for Redbubble, if I'm, let's say I'm doing art of where and I'm trying to make a, which is a print on demand company and I want to make a king size. Do I need about 15 thousand pixels? How are we going to get that when my original is only 10 thousand or maybe even 2 thousand or 600 pixels, I'm going to have to either repeat the pattern many, many times over that space, or I'm going to have to increase the size of my original design. Alright, so let's check view Pattern Preview. We're going to zoom in by the blue line here and look to see if it's truly seamless. So we do have some issues right here that are a problem, possibly. There's a line that's like, it's like mustard colored and then it's lighter. In this area where there's like 123 lines in this area, I need to soften it somehow. How can I do that? Well, I can either clone over the top of it to make it a little bit more random. There's a line here. Let me go down here and see you on the vertical. The vertical, it's looking pretty good here. Other side, on the vertical it's looking pretty good. And then of course we're gonna get the repeat of the problem. If we go far enough on this side, this side is looking fairly well. I'm not seeing anything going up from this corner. I see a little jog, but it's nothing that's super noticeable. Just really right here is where I'm running into a problem. What I might do is just clone out these lines, these three lines, which sort of draw attention to the fact that things aren't lining up so hot. See where they go. Look at our pattern. Find are three lines in here. Turn off Pattern Preview. I'm going to just kind of paint over them. I think. I'm gonna grab my color swatch, grab the color paintbrush, and blank layer. I'm just being kind of messy with it. Clean those out, and then I think there was a little problem. I don't know if it was in here somewhere. Let's look at the pattern preview and see how that changed it. View Pattern Preview. This green right here is, it's kind of problematic. I need some of this green over the line. Solid green and light green and very light green. I need to just kind of paint this all green. And this over here. It's meeting the line. I see I raised those three and that helped. But now there's like this little hard edge right there. So I'm going to grab that color so I can remember what color I'm dealing with. Then I'm going to find that if I go over to my pattern and I go down to the bottom of the blue line. And it's right here. It's a little bit fuzzy. Right here. This is where it's meeting the line. I need to get rid of that or soften it somehow. So actually chose the wrong color. I'm going to grab the yellow and grab my brush tool again. And I'm just going to delete this and soften it a little bit. Like that. I think we've got a little bit of meeting here That's weird as well. So I'm gonna grab this color and paint that away. Then there's a little bit right here, so I'm gonna grab this color. And now I can't paint outside the circle like I can't, I guess. Often merge this layer in order to make it stay though. In turn off Pattern Preview, it won't be there. You'd have to merge the layers in order for you to see it. I want to take this color down here, so let me grab that color again. This one just kind of, I don't know. It said to random thing. Like it doesn't have to be maybe not quite so. I don't know. Liking how that looks like. It needs to be like 50% opacity or something. So let's maybe do it on its own layer and just reduce the opacity. Make it softer. I don't know. We don't want it to. I need a soft brush. That's what I'm doing. I have a hard brush here. There we go. I don't know what I was thinking. Then we have some like it's not quite meeting here, right? So let's grab this color and just do a swoop through here. 100% opacity maybe. Now you see there is some texture. I could also clone it over. But on this scale with this pattern being this, let's, we can do a little cloning. Let's do a little cloning. Go down to the snap art layer, grabbed the clone tool. We're going to make it smaller grabber option tool. And then we can just kind of this kind of clogs it up a bit. I'm jumping back in here just to show you a little bit of a more concise process with this. So what I've been doing is I'm a zoomed into almost 600%. So when you're zoomed in almost at the pixel level, this is never gonna be seen by the naked eye unless you're submitting it for pattern company. And they might zoom way in and say, well, got some issues here, but I don't think it's gonna be seen. But I've been going around and doing either cloning or painting. And I'm doing this in the pattern preview mode. And that's just brilliant because it can pull in things from both edges. But the thing is, is it will all disappear if you don't flatten or merger layers before you exit Pattern Preview mode. So here I have this a jagged edge. I'm going to grab my brush and a color from the painting here. I'm just going to paint over and make the edge. Now, of course, this image has a texture from the snap art program. But at the pixel level, you're really not going to see that texture that close anywhere, that there's a line that meets the edge. I'm going to extend it over on not sort of I am going to extend it. Now. I can just take this and go like that. Maybe that's not the best, but I'm just going to extend the shape. Right here, grab the color. Extend the shape to finish it. This is a little more elegant and refined way to do it. Now here we've got two weird things meeting. So I'm just going to paint over the top of both of them. Here I have a line that's not meeting. I'm going to grab the green. And that wasn't nice. Let's try that again. Bring them together. Here we have a bit of a goat rope happening, again, grabbing the green color that I want to use and extending that through. Here we have the edge that's not blended. So I'm just gonna go over the edge and round it so that it seamless. This yellow color right here. I'm going to extend it over here a bit. Maybe. I don't know. All the way through. When that together, figure out what I want to do with all of this. Do I want to extend the shape? Maybe I do. Grab that color. Extend this blob right here. 22. Shifting Colors of a Pattern in Lr: Now this pattern that I did, I did specifically for a person who wanted the color to be quote unquote screaming orange and yellow. Because of that, I amplified those colors and I really played with those colors originally. But if your aesthetic isn't necessarily this kind of thing, you can rework a color pattern into something that is more conducive to say, room you're decorating while keeping the shape and texture and everything. I like to do it in Lightroom using the profile feature. So this is the original. And I'm going to go to more of a muted color palette like this. Now, this takes a little bit of finesse, and this is the line drawing version of this design and this is the painted version of this design. But I'm gonna show you how to develop module, how I go ahead and change it. The first thing I want to do is go over to the profile section. And I like to look through the artistic, which is a, a standard pre-packaged group of profiles from Lightroom itself. Artistic and vintage are the two places that I look first when I'm trying to change the color palette. And artistic doesn't really have, in this case, anything that's as desaturated as I'm looking for. This one, artistic, OH, kind of mutes it down. See there it's more yellow and this is more, I don't know, it gives them more of a metallic look to the whites and it mutes at all. So that's a possibility. Modern is another place that a person can look. And I think that is where I found the color palette that I liked a lot. So it was modern. I take that back, artistic, modern and vintage. If I clicked on this, this shifts the entire color palette from being more orange and yellow to being sort of a muted rows and ivory. Now if I click on it, I can go up here to the amount slider, modern five. And I can go all the way over to the right, which is making it blue, and all the way to the left, which takes it off completely. So somewhere in the middle is a good spot for the color palette that I'm looking for. And then I can close that out and continue to play with the colors. What color are we dealing with? This is probably read, I'm gonna go over to the red here. I can change the hue if I want to make it rosier or make it more orange, I wanted a little bit more rosy, a little bit more. Maybe bright, maybe a tiny bit desaturated. And I'm guessing that this is yellow. I'm going to go into yellow and desaturate it to CEO. That's yellow. So I can maybe desaturate that a bit. I can add the lightness or brightness to it, luminance to it a little bit. If I want, maybe not, then I can go back up to my basic panel and I can look at my histogram. Is there room to maneuver there? Maybe I want to make the whites move them over a little bit. I can move the blacks over quite a bit, but I don't want to do that because I'm trying to keep this vintage soft vibe going on and so it moving the blacks over while it's technically okay as far as the histogram goes in and printing and all of that, it isn't the look I was going for. Then. The greens in here, I kind of like the hunter green color that's represented. So there we go. In my head, I thought this was good, but I'm gonna go back to the reds and maybe, maybe take, I'm not sure. Saturation out a little bit. Maybe not C, That's pretty, pretty bright. Just a little bit. They're just playing. I think that's pretty good. Because I shifted the hue a little bit, it got a little bit darker. Someone opened the blacks up a little bit more. Anyway, I can play, play, play all I want and shift them around. Maybe the orange is needs to be. No, I don't want to do that. I can make the oranges more red. Yellow could go super vintage with it. And we're really desaturated. Take the oranges that are in that, the poppies and move that over, increase the lightness of impossibly. Anyway, it just gives me some dynamic room to play. And I love this. I can just go ahead and save this out as another version. That is how I adjust colors in Lightroom. 23. Cutting Out Troublesome Poppies : The first thing I need to do with this pattern is to cut out these little puppies. I ran into a lot of trouble, so I thought I'd walk you through it. Number one, the puppies are in focus only on their little faces. The leaves are out-of-focus and the stems are kind of fuzzy, both of which make cutting them out difficult. The initial thing that I tried to do is my usual select, Select and Mask, which usually works like a treat, but it didn't today, it only got the face of one puppy and part of a leaf. And so that is not going to work. I could try doing maybe object aware or color aware, but neither of those worked better than the other. All I ended up getting was a puppy face and pretty much in everything I tried, That's all I got. Cancelling out of that I decided to do. So lacked and color range. This works better. What it's doing here is it's selecting the background. If I go over to the right with fuzziness, It's Lex, more of the puppies. If I go back to the right, it selects more of the background. Now, there are some dust spots and lines and things happening. So I can go into the Plus button here and click around and try to clean up anything that is not supposed to be there. Watching to see if my poppies get more selected. It's looking pretty good. But I know for a fact that my background is not pure white and that there are some shades of gray in there. So when I hit Okay, there is a little bit of stuff happening now I want to clean up the selection before I invert it. So I'm going to clean up this area here. We're going to add to the selection, which is the background at the moment, using my rectangle tool, I'm going to try to clean this up as best I can. It's very slow, so let's try. The lasso. Works better for some reason, I don't know why. But we want to get the background selection nice and clean so that when we invert it we don't have extra anything. We'll worry about the third hand tool later. Let's invert it and do Layer via Copy. Now we can clean up our selection. I have a background layer here for black just as a testing tool. I'm going to unlock my layer here. Bring it down. See here. I think that's the one that I had. This is my layer 0, that's my original. This is my selected mask. The top is one that I did before. Looking at it, we can see that it's kind of fuzzy and it's not looking so hot. We might need to go in here and fix it, but using the black background layer helps me to see some of my issues. Select the layer. Using the Select and Mask tool we're going to subtract from selection. Find an object to subtract. I think the eraser tool may just be better. Sometimes it's easier to just be a little bit more blend about everything. I think I'm gonna have to just kind of cut this off at some point somehow because it overlaps and we're gonna get rid of this whole thing here. We can clean this up and make it look prettier later. Anywhere I see some white, I'm just going to erase it. For the most part, it's pretty good. But the black background just helps me to see what's going on. Alright, now if I want to continue to refine this, what I'm going to do is make a selection with the objects selection tool because now it's pretty much on its own. Separated from the background. I'm gonna do Select Subject, use my rectangle tool and just grab the whole thing because it should know it now, now that we have transparent pixels and not transparent pixels it showed grab pretty much everything. If it doesn't. We can go in here and use the rectangle tool on a smaller scale to make sure that everything's being selected. That there aren't any stray areas that are being ignored. Little tips of these. Now I can do Command Shift R or Command Option R. It selects it again, and in this case I can start to smooth things out. Grab this second tool down, which is the Refine Edge brush. That look a little. And go in here and just clean up any areas by tapping. This is a difficult selection, like I said, because it's out of focus so it is fuzzy. I may just go in and use oil paint filter to soften and refine edges. But because we're transparent already, it's pretty good. We have a transparent background, so we don't have to do a lot of work here. My computer is being slow. We'll deal with that later. We'll deal with that later. But let's refine our selection so we can go to the smooth tool here and hit smooth. That is going to bring the, the selection inward to smooth the selection on the edges and hit Okay. Now it makes it a little bit softer. Command D to take it off. It's still a little bit rough, but I can fix that with the oil paint filter. And that may be the best option. I do see a stray, some stray pixels up here. We really want to get rid of all of that. Because if that's there, it's going to show later on in some way, some form. Using a black background helps us to see they just looked like sparkly stars. Those are some stray pixels that were not selected and are just messy. I make my brush bigger. If we have a bigger expanse, really one or two isn't gonna be a huge problem. Just be texture, right? But if you have a lot of them, it can be bad. That is our selection. I'm going to Command J to duplicate it, Filter, Stylize oil paint. I'm going to just see how that would work. I actually don't mind how it looks on the details. Let's hit Okay. Zoom in here, lower the opacity to maybe 50%. This you'll see smooth out the edges quite a bit. It's not perfect, but I mean, it's the best it's going to do because honestly the poppy stems have little hairs on them so they aren't perfectly smooth. Anyway. You can see how adding the this is the original oil paint filter. It just brightens it up. So I'm going to merge those two together. Merge layers. And there is our final poppy. Ready for the next step. I just wanted to note that this is not a perfect selection because of the autofocus nature of it. We do have this sort of halo around it. So here's my tip to you. If you're going to be cutting things out, have as deep depth of field as humanly possible. Crank your light up, raise your ISO if you have to. But the more things are in focus, the better the selection will be. When you have out-of-focus areas, you're going to have these halos and soft kind of Bokeh. You look around the edges and there's not a whole lot that you can do about it. Now, if you do take it into a painting program, you can kind of mask this issue if you do want to maintain more out-of-focus look, maybe that's just your look, you want it more ethereal. So I wanted to show you another option quickly here in case you wanted to go in a different direction with your, with your little elements in your patterns. I'm going to Command J. This is the combined layer that we did with oil paint. And now I'm just making a duplicate layer just to have one on hand that I'm not working on the original. And I'm gonna go to Filter. Let's do exposure software, snap our four, depending on the thing that we use in stamp art for it should maintain the transparency, but sometimes it doesn't. In which case you have to go and cut it out again. It just depends on the program. In this case, it looks like it is actually putting another background on. I wonder if I can take it off and make it a transparent. Continue with no canvas. See it is it forces us to pick a canvas. I can't turn it off. Oh, transparent. There we go. There. Nevermind. Let's grab the detailed oil paint and then choose transparent. This gives a painted look to your item. You fit it there. It won't spill over because it is a cutout and it's not going to really go beyond the pixels. It's not going to bleed passive pixels, but it will kind of mush things up. Another one that I like to use as impasto. What does the abstract to look like? That one's kind of fun too. It's gonna minimize the colors. It has a thick paint effect. I could do something like this on all of my elements that I'm working with in the program and give the whole thing I painted feel. Texture can't, Let's do detailed impasto. That's one. And then I also like the stylize. Go down to stylize many lines. And again, transparent. You can play with that amount of lines. Let's do tapered strokes. Number of lines. These are other ways that you can mask it. And the thing is you'd have to be consistent whatever you choose to do with your elements, do they do it with all of the elements that you're not left with. Some odd kind of one thing looks one way and another thing looks another way. So I kind of like the detailed impasto here. If I want to restore some of the detail, I can use the restore detail brush, which is what they call the masking brush detail masking. I can make it smaller using my bracket key. And then just go over the area that I want to restore some of the detail. Maybe up here. That is another way that you can deal with things that aren't perfect selections having a more painterly effect just mimics and our mimics it, it masks some of the issues and just keep in mind if we do something like this. So let's apply this since we have it on a separate layer. And then if I click that off and turn this one on, you can see this is the oil paint option. We can mix the two together by lowering the opacity of this one and then merging the layers. But whatever you do, just be consistent across the board and do it to all of your different elements. And then when you combine them together, they look cohesive and they're meant to be that way. But when we go in and do the painted layer, and now I add my background in. It has kind of made all of the little bits of our poppy look like they're uniform, like they're meant to be like that, which is super helpful. I would continue to go in here with an eraser tool and fix. I've got to turn off this layer so that we don't see it with a small brush and softly shape and mold this to not look quite messy. But anyway, that's another thing that you can do with your elements for your, for your patterns. 24. Cutting Out Bunny Tail Grass: The next element that I want to cut out are these bunny tail grasses. And these were actually in a clump. You can see them over here in Lightroom. They were just put together in a third hand tool. All squished together and I cut off the crop so that I can separate them into four separate little bunny tail grasses. To cut these out, we're going to try the same thing, select, Select and Mask, and see how it does. It does poorly. Well, it does. It does okay. On the stem, some of them but not on the rest. So we're gonna go to the silk cut subject to selection tool and use the rectangle. And go up here and see how it does. And we can use the Refine Brush to get the little hairs. The one thing in Photoshop at least knows really well right now. At this point is doing hair just because of the way that people use selection tool is most often I'm gonna grab the refined brush tool and go over here and zoom in and then make it a little smaller. And I'm just gonna go around the periphery. And it's going to select all those little hairs like that. It does a much better job on this sort of thing. Because it's very hair-like. They're pretty good at that. It'll be a little bit messy, but it is a salt just along as it looks like a little puff ball at the top. Like this. It just grabs all those little hairs. I think it does a great job for the most part on this one. Trying to get down to the nitty-gritty here, if I get too far away, it leaves some of the background. That looks fairly good. Then I want to just double-check this area right here. Just clicking to fill in the white bits. So often cause issues. Now so often there's just a random chunk of his time that gets left off and I don't even know why it does that. It should be able to see it. A little bit of red here that I want to make sure I get off their hit, Okay. Jay, and then we can get rid of this layer mask. Hit a pie. And that looks pretty good. Let's put it on a black background just to check. It looks it looks okay. I mean, there's still there's still some bits there that I think could be better. But overall, I know I'm gonna be using the oil paint filter because I decided with a poppy that I liked the oil paint version the best. So I'm gonna stick with that. I'm going to grab this and just do filter. Well first let's just save this as it is. File save a copy. This is the original PNG. Save a copy in there. Duplicate earlier. Filter Stylize oil paint. That just gives it a super wispy and soft look, which is a totally what I'm going for. Because it's how it feels. I actually might leave that at 100% because that is much more indicative of how the bunny tail grass fields in real life, I think we turn on our background layer to see how it looks. If there's anything I have to fixed in there. I'm not liking this edge a lot. Instead of going through and selecting and everything, I'm just going to grab my clone tool. We're just going to kind of cover up this harsh line. Alright, now that I have done the oil paint filter, I wanted to separate these out into separate layers so that I could copy and paste those layers into my document later so I can move them around more independently. This is super-simple, just going to take my lasso tool. And as you've seen, done a million times before, Layer via Copy. Grab this one. Layer via copy. Except you have to make sure that he could have the original layer to do that so that you're on some pixels. Now this one's kind of tricky because it's merged with the other ones. So I'm just going to select that layer via Copy. And then select the original layer again. This one I, there's a crossover here. I think. I'm debating. I might just grab these two together as a unit and do Layer via Copy. Instead of doing a single one alone. And have this be the only one layer via Copy. Now I have all of these different options on their own layers. I can move these around, so I'll select all of these layers and then copy those into our document for making our pattern. 25. Busy Ditsy Pattern with Bunny Tail Grass and Poppies: I've opened a new layer, created a new layer or a new file, and it's 12 thousand by 12 thousand pixels at 150 PPI. Then two that I've pasted through copy and paste a whole bunch of little icons here to move around. I've got this one which I cut out after the fact. It was similar to the very first one that we did with the same issues, but I processed at the same. There is the first one that we did turn on this 11 of the bunny tail grasses. Another one. I'm just kind of moving them around so I can get their scale. As they were created in reference to each other. Oops, I've gone in, grabbed more than one layer. This one, another one. Kind of tuck it up there. And then the last one, this is the one that we did two together. These are our elements that we have all to work with. And I'm trying to think about how I want to make this look. I think I want it to be kind of like a little arrangement. I do need some kind of around poppy, Around puppy face. And it could be one of these. It could be this one. It even could be this one cut out. But if we end up with these rough edges at the bottom, I like to tuck them in behind something else. A poppy leaf would be good as well. These populations are kind of spindly and wispy, so they're not as good at for covering up in masking things. I just need something to soften it, but we'll see how it works. Okay. Let me take off. All of these will start to arrange them according to what looks good to me. All right, so let's take this one and I think I'm going to use Control T to transform and I'm gonna make it nice and big. I'm also deciding, do I want to have the repeat right away? Do I want to work with the prep Pattern Preview or do I want to work within the confines of my square? Maybe we should make a motif that's within the confines of the square. So let's just maybe move this one here. Grab the next one. I'm going to transform that one bigger. Now to figure out how am I going to arrange this? How do I want this to look? I want this one to be forward. So I'm going to drag that up to the top and kind of put it in front. I can also transform it and tip it. Maybe move it over, trying not to go off the edge. I might have to erase part of it if I want to do this as well. Let's see how far I have to go. If I go there. You can go right to the edge but not over. Turn on a bunny tail grass. Start to tuck these in. Thinking about this in terms of how you would a flower arrangement. How would I tuck them in? A flower arrangement? There? This one here, my dog making a racket, maybe I'll do this one in front. Let me drag this up to the top, which we'll put it in the front. Maybe kind of tip it. I don't know. Maybe I do want it in the back. Drag it back down. Maybe I want to duplicate that one command J, Command T. And I'm going to flip it horizontal. And maybe it's pulling out over here. I don't want it to be in the way of the poppy though. No matter what I do, it's going to be intersecting that puppy. I guess that's okay. The thing that's nice about patterns is there a lot more forgiving? Want to vary the sizes of my bunny tail grass there as well. I need something up here. So let's see what happens when we have this one Command T. This is the two for the one that has two on it. And we'll just kind of put those maybe right there. Alright, so now we've got the pattern going, and now I need to start thinking about how I want to fill in all the gaps. I could take. This one at the top here, which is one of the first pop up the first puppy pattern that we did. Command J, command, oops, Command J. Hello, t. Let's flip it around. Tuck it in down here. The other one that I did that you didn't watch me do Command J, command T. Maybe flip that one horizontal. I need to bring it forward so I can see what's going on. Do it right there, but I'm going to tuck it back. All right, So this is obviously a motif that's within the confines of the square. I do want to do something with a puppy face. I need to cut a puppy face out or something that can cover up some of the mess in here. It's pretty messy. I could do smaller bunny tail grasses, maybe that would work. Let's take a bunny tail grass Command J, command T. We went to the top. I can always erase the stamp if I want to. Let's just do that. I can erase the stem grabbed literally, I'm just going to grab the eraser tool, make it nice and big. And then starting where I'm pretty sure the stem is, erase away. Let me just have this little bunny tail sticking in there. Man J Command T. To transform this. Make it smaller. Kind of tuck that down in there. Displaying like being Bob Ross and you're just playing with your Canvas. I do need something up in this area here. Just to be kind of a stinky. Let's go find this one. I'm gonna do at horizontal and make it smaller. Ticket up right in this area. It did I take the whole thing. Oh, my goodness. Let's go back. It didn't copy. I hate it when it does that command J, Command T before you start transforming and moving, make sure it really duplicated. Do it again. I'm debating whether I want it to be overlapping. All of them are just some of them. All right, let's continue on with working with pattern preview. So now we have all of these together and I might, I want to do the other ones that are kind of stick beyond. So what I can do is just save this as a PSD that way or a Photoshop file. And that way I have all of these layers where they are. If in case I have to backtrack and go straight to the beginning of this step and real rearrange things. Remember when we use Pattern Preview smart, smart objects, making this all the smart object, it doesn't always work as good as we'd like it to work. But we can try it. Convert to Smart Object. It'll work with this fine because all of it's within the boundary of the frame. Now you Pattern Preview. Now, here's something that I could do. I could group all of this together and select it all, and then I can move it around. So let's do our selection tool. Just do marquee tool. In J Command T, I can start to overlap things. I'm just debating if this is a direction I want to go or not. I'm thinking probably not. This is an option if you have a more smaller motif. But I mean it's something I could do. Let's just try it on for size. It takes a bit to transform it. And now I need something to combine or to bring it all together. Let's go in and grab whenever elements. Maybe this one command C. And we'll paste it in here. Now that's on the top. So if I want to pull it to the two behind things, so it's not sticking out quite so much. I can do that. Maybe one more of those. Do another, lay her Command V to paste. Since I already had it on the clipboard, it was there. Maybe a bit horizontal. Maybe. Exhibit back out. Getting pretty busy. I need some just flex of pink. I think what I'm gonna do is go over to one of my items here. And I'm just going to select with my lasso tool here via Copy. See command V to paste, Command T to transform. I could have probably grabbed more of the stem. I think what I did, I'm not sure how I feel about it with no stem on it. I think I need more stem. Let's go back to this and I'm gonna do a different one with a little bit of stem. Grab the stomach. Did the wrong version. I never grabbed one. I'm just going to grab one with more of the stem. Hey, make sure I've got one that's got all of the stem. And then I'm just gonna take my little eraser tool, this and just make it look a little bit less sharp. C V to paste and Command T to transform. No matter what I do, I tend to have busy patterns and you may be totally different. Command J, command T, flip horizontal, me, erase that right there. I feel like I need to do another pattern where it's the bunny tail grasses get more real estate and it feels a little bit less busy. This is pretty pretty busy. Then I want to merge all the layers that have been, Hello, My dog is stop whining. Merge those layers. Seriously? No, not going to take you up right now. All right, view Pattern Preview, see if anything disappear. So this is our pattern, this is our repeat pattern. I can merge these layers. There is our repeat that is a little bit on the busy side. I'll admit not exactly what I was looking for, but I wanted to try some different techniques to show you. Now I can save that file, Save a Copy. I'll say final one. That I think I'll go take the dog out because she's just gonna sit here and wine until I take her out. So I'll save that and I will see you. I'll just continue on with another version of this pattern. 26. Simple Bunny Tail Grass Pattern: I've opened a new document and it's 12 thousand by 12,150 PPI. Now, I've been thinking about this and this is a big part of pattern-making and just design making and composite photography in general. How do I want to put the pieces together? What do I want it to look like? Well, I really like English patterns, things that are very vintage looking. I'm not actually a person who likes super huge flowers in my patterns. I've just been looking at my different elements here, my grasses, and that was one that I played with it I didn't like very much. It was just too busy for me. I worked on this and I actually will include the video prior to this, but I actually decided I don't like this very much. It feels too much like a spoke with things jutting out and I think it would be really nice printed, tiny, but not big and bold because I feel like it's too busy, big and bold. But anyway, moving back to our elements, I noticed that this one had a very sweeping curve to it. So I thought, well what would happen if I went in and took my elements from the little bunny tail grass and I bent them and I made them have a bit of a curve. What I'm going to do is use Puppet Warp to go in and change each of the elements after I copy and paste them onto the document and then start to arrange them with a little bit more of a curve so it feels more curvy unless linear. I've got them selected here and I'm just going to Command C and then go over to my new document right here and Command V to paste. And that's just going to add all of these bunny tail grasses right above my bottom base layer. Let's work with those first before I introduce the puppies, taking off each one and just working with one at a time. I'm going to use Puppet Warp. I've got this one selected and I can use my lasso tool. What we can see if it works with. I'm going to have to use my Lasso tool. So we have to select this in order to be able to puppet warp it. So let's select around it. Then do see Layer via Copy. This just makes it have less on it. Let's go and show you what we're dealing with here. Just this one little layer. Edit, Puppet Warp. Now it puts a mesh across the whole thing. And now I have to put little points on it by taking this arrow and anchoring it. I'm gonna put a point right there. One right here, one in the middle, maybe a third down, one at the bottom. Now I can start to sort of drag and bend. Little guy here. Maybe you bump this out. Have a nice little curve. It hinges off your points. So if you want to be more subtle with the curve, you're gonna have to add more points and then just hit Okay, and it saves it there. That is one. And I like that being a little bit more bent. Let's, since it's already selected, let's just copy that command C. We already on the layer. I guess I already have it there. Let's just leave it there. I guess this is my original file that we opened. Turn that one off. Turn this one on. Select it. Then it's gonna make me, oh no, ADH works. Okay, Puppet Warp grabs the mesh. We're going to put little points on just like we did before. Maybe we'll have to see what happens if I don't mesh or put dots on that one. Let's pull it. Started. Maybe go with an S with that one. I don't like that. Tip. It's it'll head down. Accidentally added another spot. Okay. I think in this case I'm going to just delete this off of it just by using our Eraser tool. That's another one down. We'll do this one. Now for whatever reason it's showing without my having to lasso it. So we'll just go with it. One thing about Photoshop is I sometimes don't remember what I did to do things right. We're going to put one on this leaf so we can maybe manipulate that. Let's maybe do an S curve with this one. So sort of tip it like that. This leaf over like this, that looks good. Just give a little bend if we don't have to be super aggressive with it. But we want it to be, you know, Puppet Warp isn't on this middle tab to select the layer. That would be why you got to have the right one selected point. Point, point. Maybe do a bit of a circle with this one. I don't know. We'll see how far we can bend it. A little teeny tiny stem. We're trying to soften this up a little bit because it's very pokey. It feels a little jagged. If you feel like what you're doing feels jagged. You might want to add some more points. Then just push them around. Jelly. Get the curve to comply. It's a little less. It's still jerky, but we're going to go with it. But just because of time sake, just a second ago, Photoshop crashed and I lost everything that I was working on. Probably a warp is pretty intensive as far as pulling RAM from your computer when you're, when it's doing it. So its thing, so it can be really frustrating when it, when it crashes and it happens and so you should be prepared. What I did was I went through I reimported the pictures and I Puppet Warp them all on the same document and then I saved it out as a PNG. This is not as refined or as good as I'd like it to be. Just because I was trying to just do it quickly. But you just have to be careful. Now I have a backup copy on my files so that if it happens again, I have it. Anyway. All of these are individual, late on individual layers and they're all curved a little bit so I can start making my pattern. Alright, I'm gonna turn these off to reveal the bottom layer. Then I can start to arrange and I have to decide do I want to use pattern preview where I'll have to merge everything? Or do I want to start building within the square? I think I'm going to use pattern preview this time because I want it to be sort of a soft and loose and open pattern. Let me import in our pictures that are the other bits of it, Command C. We know that's gonna go in there. And I have one other one that in there as well. Now as soon as I cross the barrier as I'm moving it around, it's going to link it to another one. So it's better to always copy from your original file then from this one because it's gonna copy to I'm trying to think of how I can connect this where it's loose. Still connected in some way. This is a very bulky end. I'm not liking how bulky that is. Can make this a little bigger. Again, we're going for kind of a soft and loose pattern that has some rhythm to it. I'm going to go back to the one that I have here. I'm going to soften and sort of erase down here. Oops, it's being, being kind of a, but let's just work on it without Pattern Preview. Grab my eraser tool. I'm just going to softly integrate. It, repeats it going for soft and those pattern here. Let's grab some of the bunny tail grasses. Grab that one. Where can this lovely S curve go? Maybe kind of come out from this. Merge them together. Put this behind it. Like that. I think these little curly cue options are gonna be good for us for this command T. Where can I do with this one? This one has more bulky feel to it. We have to do some blending. Maybe I go like that, drag it behind the main one there. Then just grab my eraser tool again. I could use a black mask as well. I'm just making it meetup. Fit works. Again, you probably are going to want to save it as you go. I might have to erase some more. There. Wasn't like how close it was to them, to this leaf. It's kind of blending it. They're making it look like it's seamless. Which is the goal. Can we do with this guy? Sneaky? Like a snake? I like it there, so I'm gonna have to put something underneath it. I like how it nestles in there. At this point, I could put a lot of thought has to go into this command T. It's connected four of them. If I cross over it. Alright. Feel like it's too thick. Let's grab our original flower. Flip it horizontally. Maybe. Go in there. I just continue to have my eraser tool active, which helps to blend everything. And then maybe something coming off into this area because this one's repeated with this. So if I put something off of here, it will spill over into both of these areas. So I'm gonna grab that one. Command C, command V to paste Command T to transform again. Is there a way? Sort of have this blend right here? I think it can just go like that. And if I pull it behind, I think if we have too little bunny tail grasses right here, that should complete it. So let's figure out which bunny tail grass I want to add some work with that one which we haven't worked with yet. Nice curvy one. Add that to it and just see where it went to go behind her on top. Went on top. So let's drag it down beneath. Because it's all within the square, we can just copy and paste it. Command J, command T, turned it around. Horizontal flip. Having a little bit of an issue there. Then maybe one more in this space. Alright, so in order to have my bent money tail grass, I'm just going to reopen it. The one that I meant and shifted around and open it here into a separate document so that I can copy and paste it from there, grab it like this. Command C. Go over to my document Command V to paste, Command T to transform. I'm going to just gently tuck that in here. Hit Okay, and then zoom in to see where I've connected it. Then I'll just go up here to see if I can blend this and a little bit. Using my eraser tool. Just to blend it in so it doesn't have any obvious overlaps. All right. I'm liking this a lot better. I apologize for my dog whining and breathing heavily. She's having a moment apparently Command J, command T. And I might add another, since these were so wispy and soft, I can just add them in a couple of other places. I like how they look. They're a big part of the summer because there's something I know I wanted to grow over and over again. And then maybe one more in the middle here by that pink Command J command T, maybe transform it horizontally. Kind of tuck it back here. I can make this one smaller. Maybe have it coming out the side. I don't know. Maybe I want to flip it horizontal again. I wanted to sort of meet up, not with the the petals like that. All right, I like how this is looking. This is very soft and feminine and balanced. Now I'm going to merge everything. Merge layers. I could also save it out as a PSD at this point to make sure that I keep everything just so but I think I like the balance on this. I'm not somebody. I'd be more likely to recreate the whole thing from scratch then I would be to tweak it. So I'm going to save this after I check it. File, Save a Copy. And then I'll do this as pattern to pattern. One was one that I threw together and I didn't like it as much. The video will be in here, but I didn't like it as much. I'm gonna say pattern too. And hit Save. 27. Long Form: Complete Rose: In this video, I'm going to show, before going all the way back to the raw images, to the, after. We're going to work through a classic rose pattern. I have a few images here. I'm gonna cut them out and then use pattern preview to create a pattern. I think I'm going to use a line drawing effect from snap art to finish each one. Let's get started. All right, So this is kind of a long form. You might want to fast-forward through bits, but this is what I do. I start with my crop tool. I'm going to bring this in and just crop and I don't know if I'm going to use all of the elements that I brought over, I'm only going to use maybe a few. We'll see how time goes by. I want you to kind of see the whole thing. Now I want to brighten this up just a hair. I'm going to use Command M, which brings up the curves adjustment and I can just pull that up and it's done it on that layer so I can't adjust it again. I can only take it off, but I know it's going to be fine. So I just did it right on that layer. Now go to Select, select and mask and select subject and we'll see how well Photoshop reads this image. Always takes a second for it to do its thing. Did pretty good job. I'm using a second option down, which is the Refine Edge Tool. And I'm going to go in and just click over the leaves, which reveals the leaves for the most part and gets rid of red on the spaces. We've seen this before, but the pink, It's hard to see there that there's actually pink on there. So I am going to use the very first one at the top and hit it on the bud. And it helps to remove. Here, you can see it better here. So this is a little bit pink when I hit the first one, which is called the Quick Selection Tool, and I just click on it. I think that's a bud too. I thought it was pink from the mask, but it may not be back to the Refine Edge tool. Make it a little smaller. Click in these areas. Here I can show you. Here we have some pink, that's what's happening. So I'm gonna grab the first one again. Just click on this. And it takes the pink off, which is what we want. Honestly guys, I am not that rigid about my selections because often I will go to a painterly processing to finish these. The thing about patterns is you have to imagine how people are consuming them. Unlike art, where we stand in front of it and we stare at it, fabric is moving. Even if it's something like a pillow, it's on a shape. It's not flat. Therefore, it's something that we are going to perceive differently. And I find that if there's too much in the way of detail that the patterns not only might have trouble printing, because the file sizes are so big and they have so many color variations. Even, even sublimated printing, which is the kind that is digitally printed where you can have unlimited colors and you can straight up, print photographs on pillows or fabric or what have you. What I find out a bit frustrating and you can see I just jumped back to whichever tool works the best. I'm not. I'm just using the Quick Selection Tool to try to grab see that the Quick Selection Tool grabs the whole leaf. And then back to the Refine Edge tool to refine that. Because we're consuming it differently. It's really helpful to learn what you like as far as fabric goes. I like things to be a more painterly, which is generally my band, no matter what type of photography I'm doing. But I like how fabric looks when it's not photorealistic, when it's not quite as as realistic as a photo, I feel like it doesn't translate well because, oops, I went too far. The folds, the bumps, all of that are not always attractive when it comes to fabric. Things to store twist. If you imagine someone wearing like a fabric that has a bit of stretch to it and that didn't work. I'm trying to catch this part right here. And it keeps catching the whole thing. So it's being a bit of a stinger. So we'll just do our best to make sure you go around the edges. Anyway, there is a certain amount of distortion that happens. And if somebody recognizes, perhaps like somebody's face on fabric, like if you put a family photo on a pillow, people get distorted just because they're a Because they're not happen in my selection. Let me go back. Here we go. Let's do our selection first. Go up here to the select object tool right-click Layer via Copy. I'm just going to take a peek and see how it is. It's not as good as I would like it to be. Especially in this area. Let me use my eraser tool and I'm going to kind of get rid of this bit here. I'm just soften that edge. Now here's a little trick that I do sometimes when I'm feeling like I want to cheat a bit. And that's to take the layer that I've just selected and I'm going to duplicate it a few times like that. And then Shift-click to merge them. Right-click. And that makes duplicate layers which sometimes fills in enough. It's really not too problematic for me now one of the things I'm noticing is that there's a little bit of a shadow and a halo on it. You'll see this better. If I go and add a background layer, Let's add a background air, maybe a black one. Do you see that there is a bit of a halo that's happening right there and I'm not really sure what the deal is. I could go in with an eraser tool, make sure I'm on the layer. That's important and I can erase that. Like that. I'll leave a little bit and I'll show you another thing. Take off the background layer. Take that. And I do File, save as copy. I'm gonna save this into my main flower folder. This is flowers. I save it as a PNG. I hit Save. Once that's saved, what I'm gonna do is just open it up and do the instant alpha. I believe it is. I always call it the wrong thing. Open this up, find the flower that I just did, double-click on it. Checking, checking to make sure I'm still recording. Go to my preview. And you can't really see it on here. But if you go to mark up and down to the incident alpha and I drag it down, it should grab the outside where there's stuff happening. And delete that. There's a bit right here. I'm gonna select that and delete it. And look to see if there's anything else weird. I mean, like I said, I'm not super critical about this because there's so many imperfections anyway, but there's a little bit down here. Kind of fill that in and delete it. That makes it work a little bit better. I just click out of it because it'll save it. I'm, since I'm working in preview of the flowers in the folder, it will pop something up there to show that it's processing and then it just merges it with the original. There's image one. And this will be imaged two. Same thing. I'm going to process it exactly the same way. There's a bit of redundancy when you're doing this kind of thing. For sure, and it can be a little bit boring. Command M. I want to lighten up the leaves a little bit like that. Select, Select and Mask. Select subject. Here I didn't do any of the green. So let's go down to the selection tool and use the Add to Selection button. I'm going to try rectangle because sometimes that one works better, works pretty good sometimes. And I'm just trying to block in the rest of the leaves and the stem. Sometimes lasso works better, sometimes see that didn't work well. I just experiment to see what works best. Will try. See it's still not working for whatever reason it doesn't like that. So let's try the Refine Edge tool. Click over these interior areas. Incidentally, I find sometimes the Refine Edge tool works better when I've gone in with the select object tool with the rectangle, grab the first one and try to fill this button. I worked for like an OU, there's a nasty little ear wig or something tucked in there. Leaf. It's really kind of being stinky. Sometimes it has problems when it's out-of-focus. If it's a bokeh area, it can be problematic sometimes I might just undo that and leave that leaf off. I'm just command Z being and taking it back. Just deciding that that leaf doesn't need to be in here. I'm gonna delete whatever that creature is in a minute. Because it kinda over spilled onto the little puddles here. Clean that up. Once you get into this groove, it's not as hard as it looks. It gets easy, but it is a bit tedious. I was talking with a photographer friend last night and she said that she just cannot imagine cutting things out and doing this because it's so tedious and time-consuming and one person's tedious and time-consuming and as another person's relaxing and fun. I struggle with like golf. My family people love golfing. I'm come from a family of golf or whatever to each his own. Whatever floats your boat. Then check the edges. You can see the gray around the edges here. It's because it's in the bokeh area. And I think I might have to do my little trick where I double up on this. To get the stem to completely show. We'll see how it works. Hit Okay. And then Layer via Copy. Remember you have to have selection tool selected in order to do that layer via copy, the background layer. And it's just not looking so hot there. I actually might just, I don't know if I should get rid of all of these leaves. Let's do some duplicates. Command J, Command J Command J, Shift-click to emerge. I might go in here with the eraser tool to clean some stuff up there, some stuff happening along the edge here I must have had shallower depth of field when I did this on the normal. I did not look. I'm just going in here with the eraser tool and sharpening the edge up. There's a little bit of spillage there of some kind. And go in here with my little Content Aware eraser. And we're gonna see if we can get this out, whatever this is. Another reason why I like pain or they stuff because real life is just filled with edges and not pretty things. Part of the pretty thing of patterns. And it goes back to what we were talking about with say I'm going to have to use the incident alpha to take care of this little bit that's left. So let's just save this out. I'll save a copy. And PNG, I leave the filenames the same so that I could always connect them with the original. But anyway, one of the reasons, another reason why I like to use the painterly processing is that we can't take in that much detail that like a photograph when we're looking at something that's on a living subject, like an address on a person. It's open that one up. Zoom in, I can see the remnants of what I was doing. Now, I could go in here with an eraser tool, you know, and use some other kind of thing. Let me make sure I didn't erase anything I needed to there. But it can be time-consuming ever really. We're just looking for the path of least resistance. Now see this isn't going to work because it's going to delete bunches of my flower. Command Z to take that selection off. Just wanting the edges, they're not Within anything and see this is just selecting stuff around the outside. You see it flashing there. And then I hit delete. And that cleans it up for the most part, way faster than I could if I were doing this with the eraser and Photoshop. If you're on a PC, I don't know if there's something similar to this. I'm sure there is. You could just do a search, but or you could just go in and use the eraser tool, but I find this faster for me so that, that just cleans it up. Then just click out of it. It does a pop, a duplicate in here as it's saving and then merge them. All right, so let's do one more. And maybe I will fast-forward through this so that you don't have to listen to me drone on fast-forward now. Now I've gone through and cut out all of these options. So I have 1234567 options here. And we're going to make a pattern from them. So before I do that, I'm going to select all the ones that I just did. I did a little housekeeping as I was cutting out. I didn't save the cutout to the original file. I just deleted what would be the PSD because I just want these as PNGs and his saved the original raw over in Lightroom. So I'm just going to open these with Photoshop and bring them back in. Now that I have all of my images cut out and they're in here. I brought in a couple of extra pieces and those are a couple of leaves. I haven't more than blush leaf, which we already has an oil paint effect on it. And then this is a rose leaf. I think it was from a charlotte Rose, but they're all really similar. And this has water spots on it. And I'm going to use an oil paint filter on this as well. I have all my roses and I just need to decide what I want to do with them to make them all cohesive as far as the pattern goes. Anything, I'm going to use the oil paint filter. That's really fast. For each one. I'm just going to make them like a 50%. We'll paint filter command J. We're going to start with this one. And then filter, stylize oil paint and hit Okay, I have those settings. You can stop the video if you want to see my settings. So that actually works out okay to a 100%. So I'm just going to flatten this. I'm gonna try them all at 100%. I'm not gonna be swoops. Don't want to do that. We don't want to flatten. We want to merge. If you flatten, it has a solid background again. Next one over. Now that I've done the oil paint, I can actually go ahead and just hit oil paint at the top because it remembers the settings. That's good. Filter oil paint. That's really fast and handy thing. Since I'm not going in and lowering the opacity or making it any any adjustments to it. I can just keep going on and hit filter oil paint because it will remember the last thing I did. Next. I like to use the oil paint filter because at the end of this process, I'm going to go ahead and skip this one because it's already done. I'm gonna go ahead and use index color to minimize the amount of, amount of color in these images. And it's easier, more easily done. If I have fewer colors and less detail, which the oil paint filter affords me. This one hasn't been done yet. I don't think this one has been done either. That one has been done. We started with that one. I'm not going to save any of these pieces out as the oil paint option because I can I can do it pretty fast each time and I might want to do a different effect on it. So I just leave the original in my flowers folder and go ahead and run whatever featured type fact I want to put on it each time I make a pattern file new. And for this pattern, I'm going to do 13500 by 13, five hundred, thirteen thousand, five hundred, thirteen thousand, five hundred by 150 people, PPI. Another option is 7 thousand by 7,300. And PPI, which is very similar because it has twice. Twice the the PPI. Really, you can do whatever works for you. Actually, maybe I'll just do the 7,001. Keeping it smaller is sometimes better. It could because at the end I will just make a bigger repeat of it. I want to use transparent background. Hit Create. Now what I want to do is get all of these, these images here individually onto this background as separate layers. To save time, I just went ahead and I copied each one and pasted it into the document, just using the command C command V function and its control C control V, I believe on a, on a PC. When I did that, each time it put the little flower onto its own layer, I'm going to add a blank layer here because I inadvertently put a picture on the background layer. Now I have a blank layer at the backend, at the bottom. Now, what I thought I would do is start to rearrange these and create a motif. And we've done this before. I just want to kind of arrange them in a pleasing arrangements like a flower arrangement. And then I might group those things and then just move that group around and kind of make an English garden style classic pattern. It helps if you have your images all sort of spread around. It helps to move them apart from each other so you can see what you're working with. Don't concern yourself too much with things going on in the background. If it's easier, you can turn off each layer, which I might do just for simplicity sake. And start with this one. Hit Command T. And I'm going to just put it in the middle. I think I'm going to group all these together, like I said, as a, as a motif, as like a little arrangement. So it doesn't matter if it's straight in the middle. Turn this one on. Select it Command T. I think I want the pieces all to be somewhat separate. I don't want them looking too close to each other, so tilting and moving. Next one, let me empty. Hey, we'll have this one kind of tip outward again to remember when you're arranging for patterns, it isn't necessarily like you would in a vase or something. It's a different animal. Because most patterns, well, not all patterns, many patterns are single directional meaning you can only look at them at one way. If you think of a twelv, French 12 pattern or some wallpaper like you wouldn't want to put it upside down because it has elements that need to be right-side-up. I don't tend to make patterns like that. I tend to like patterns that go all different directions. If you're doing that too, just remember that you can have things that are upside down and backwards and that it's fine. All right, So at this one, maybe I'll kind of tuck. I'm talking this behind this blossom up here. Like that. Now leaves are great because they can get tucked in just about anywhere. And they can cover things up. They can add a little bit of visual interest. I don't necessarily work with them though as the main attraction. Usually. If I wanted to have like a leaf coming out here, I could do that. I'm not convinced. I'm not sure if I'll keep it there. We'll see. Turn this one on. Maybe I'm going to bring this one to the fourth forefront. So I'm going to drag it to the top which puts it above everything else. Kind of cover up the stems that are in the way there. I remember where I was at here. Command T. And I might move this one over here. Again, I'm gonna pull this one to the top. Command T again too, reactivate it. Something like that. This is pretty, pretty straightforward here. Yeah. I like this. I don't like I want to tip this one here on the right, so I'm gonna figure out which one that is. I think it's that one. Make it a little bit bigger and turn it. Then I'm not a fan of these leaves. I think they're okay. I just need to move them in a weird location. That's better. Again, it doesn't necessarily have to make that much sense. Now there's a little blank area here, so I might put one or more of those leaves, Command T or Command J, command T. And I'm going to flip it horizontal. It just did. Never mind. I didn't actually Command J command T. Now flip horizontal. Make it smaller. Just tuck it in there. To fill in some of that negative space. I might copy it again, command J, Command T, that direction with it. Fill up this space down here. Now that everything's arranged, I want to group this together and save the motif out. And that way I can drop and drag it into the picture to build the pattern. There's a lot of ways you can build a pattern, but the easiest way I've found is to have it on a separate folder and then you can just drop and drag into Photoshop versus trying to copy and paste or work with the pattern preview with all the stuff on it. It can get really confusing and there are some issues that happen when you start to cross over the edges using Pattern Preview. Things, connect to other duplicates of themselves and make it hard to move them around. So we may run into that. So first of all, what I'm gonna do here is describe everything here and group it together. I'm going to merge the layers. I could just use Command G to group it as well. But that saves the layers. But for the most part, I think I'm just going to use it as it is right here. So I'm going to just do File, Save a Copy. I'm going to save it as a PNG. I'm going to just call this rho as motif and save it as a PNG, right in the flowers folder, I think I have a separate folder for motifs, but at a glance, it's really easy to see them in a bigger folder as you scroll through. So I'm just going to go ahead and save it there. Once I have that saved, I can leave this here and use it, or I can just turn it off and keep it as a backup. All right, so here's our background layer. I'm gonna go back to my flowers folder, grab the motif and drag it in. And then I'm gonna do filter, sorry, view Pattern Preview. Now, interestingly enough, this could be your pattern. You could add in some extra things that cross over the edge. And I might do that. I think I want it to be a little bit more breathing room. I'm going to go Command T and just make this a little bit smaller and move it out to the edge here. I'm going to make these motifs into different sizes. Drag one another one on here, make it smaller. Maybe turn it to randomize it. Again. You could, you could stop here and have a simple repeat pattern. If you're going to do that, I might give a little bit more breathing room there. So this might be like a wallpaper or a Du Bei blanket. I mean, you could leave it just like this. A lot of these different effects, you can leave just how they are. If you want a traditional half-drop pattern, this is what this looks like. I like things a little bit less precision. I want them to look a little bit more scattered. Now I might add in some extra individual flowers that I copy and paste onto layers to fill in some of the gaps. And I'm going to extend the motif out by dropping and dragging things in here. Let's find the roses. I like this one. So Command C, go back to my layer here and put that in and make it smaller. Where do I want this to come in? Maybe I can just have it be just kind of floating out there. I could do that. I don't usually like things floating though. I struggle with this because these leaves look so different than the other ones. So maybe I'm gonna take my eraser tool and just get rid of these leaves here. It's a very organic processes you can tell. And I'm just gonna make this smaller. Now I can Command T This, have it emerge from the pattern without quite so much activity going on around it. Maybe add I was going to add something from there, but maybe not. What do we have? Maybe this one. It's kind of an organic process where you're just, oops, I must not have copied that one. Where to go Command C, command V to paste, command T to transform, go horizontally. With that. Maybe have it coming out of that leaf. I might erase part of the stem so that it sort of Nestle's up in there, like right there. I'm going to erase some of that and then pull it down to behind everything. Trying to get that to fit in there. I could again, I could stop here. I think I might I think this is enough busy, busy work. I like to have a little bit of breathing room in there where it isn't just completely solid and I think this looks like a pretty floral rows wallpaper. So let's merge everything together. I'm going to merge this together, merge layers. The reason I have to do that is because I have things that are overlapping. And if I don't merge, the layers are grouped them, then when I turn off Pattern Preview, they will disappear. So here's my repeat, swear my tile. Now what I want to do is save this out, File, Save a Copy. And I'm going to just save it in my patterns folder, the main patterns, and I'll say just call it rho is motif because it's only roses. There was motif tile. Maybe. I'm just going to save it out. As a PNG. This is saved without the background. Now, I'm going to index the color. I have a backup of the original. So if I want to change the colors later, I can. Now you know that as you've seen in this course, I don't really save things as separate layers for tweaking. I just save it as a whole. And then if I want to remake the pattern and in a different form or fashion, I have all the individual elements. I can go ahead and do that from scratch, which usually works better for me than tweaking something I have. I go by gut a lot. If you're somebody more precision, you can always save out a big PSD with all of the layers to separate. And it'll be ginormous, it'll be huge. If you have it, then you can always go ahead and tweak your original. Alright, so now what I'm going to do is index this color and we have light greens, dark greens, light pink, dark pink. I want to bring this together is more cohesive. The first thing I want to do though, is determine, do I want to minimize the greens? And I think I do, I wanted to make them a little bit more subtle. For that, I'm going to go Command J and then Filter, camera Raw Filter. Bring that up. I'm gonna go over to my greens and lower the saturation on them. Like that. The interesting thing that you might notice here is that the tile looks completely different and that's because it's it's along, sorry, but it's kept, it remembers what I was doing in Pattern Preview. So don't be alarmed if things look a little different when you bring them in here, I'm going to lower the greens, just unmute them out a little bit and hit Okay. Then we're back to our smaller tile. See if I go to Crop tool. I guess it it is showing there that's really weird though. Look at what happens. So here's my tile. I'm going to go to Filter, camera Raw Filter. It completes each of these uncompleted areas of the tile. Photoshop is remembering that it can get super confusing, but just know that you need to merge the layers in order to keep your tile from having things disappear. Anyway. Let's go to image mode, index color. I need to merge the layers in order to do that. This is 13 colors. And you can see that there is some kind of moodiness happening here. Let's try 14 colors. That's a little better. I think we might stick with 14 colors. You want to have none there. Local adaptive. That's looking pretty good. We can actually go to 15 colors. Let me see what ten colors looks like. Ten colors actually works even better. I actually like, Well, I don't know, see I lose all the detail in this one with ten colors. 1114, Let's try 14. No matter what I do, I'm losing colors. This one, it really doesn't look any worse at ten. Okay? This gives that kind of poster causation type look at reduces the amount of colors, but this makes it print on fabric a whole lot better. Now I'm gonna show you a little trick. If something happens to you, this isn't kind of a bonus lesson. I don't really like how this is looking right here. I'm gonna do a little trick, a little cheat. I'm going to go down here, and I've had to put it back into RGB mode. Remember you have to go to Image Mode. And then RGB again because you can't say an index color and make any adjustments. So when I in-between recording, I just went back to RGB mode, grab my Lasso Tool, and I want to feather this selection little bit. So maybe five pixels. Actually, I'm going to go all the way out like that Layer via Copy. Now I have that selected Command T. Move this around. Go up here. And I shouldn't, I shouldn't have feathered this selection. So let, let me, let me try that again. Feathering with selection looks too obvious when we've done this. So I'm gonna use a 100% solid here, no, no feathering. Let's try that again. I'm gonna just grab this part of the flower layer via Copy command T to move it out of the way. When photography, we're always trying to soften edges to blend things in. But in this case, when you're indexing the color and having it turned more into straight up photo or straight up illustration, it works better. Now, this is a solid line, it looks weird. Maybe I can go in here with an eraser tool, make sure it's a solid brush and I can clean this up a little bit and just play with it a little too, just make it look not quite so. Make it look a little more random. No one will ever notice, I promise. Okay. I just wanted a little more color up there. It looked a little naked. So that is the index color. You may say, this doesn't look as good. It's not a flower, a picture anymore. It's this weird blotchy stuff. But when you go ahead and print this, it's going to look better and I can't remember what we indexed it at. History will tell me. Just say index color, I bet. Anyway we won't go back, but I think I did it. I do it at ten. I'll have to go back and watch the video. Anything 15 and under it's usually printable. But if I wanted to index it again, I could marriage this. Merge down. Image mode, index, color. I did index at ten. That's good. That's plenty narrow. Let's see. Let's do maybe I didn't index. I see that we lost a lot of detail there. So 12, maybe 11. Yeah, that works fine for me. There we go. So we can save this. And you're not wanting you're not going to want to mess with this too much at this point anymore. Because anything you do for if you raise the exposure changes saturation, you're adding more colors back in. Remember, colors aren't necessarily, they're also, they're not necessarily like blue-green. It's also values within the same hue. If you have green and you brighten some new darken, some, you've added more colors. This keeps it at about ten or 11, whatever we chose, and therefore we are done. One thing you can do though, is go in and change the colors that you have within it. So maybe for instance, I think that this deep pink, peachy color is too dark. I can go in here to Image Adjustments. Replace color. I can go to the top here and select this color. Then I can change the hue of that. Maybe I don't want to change the hue too much, but maybe I want to maybe make it not quite so bright. Maybe I want it more muted. I can do that. Or if I want to keep it where I had it. And I want to brighten it up to make it a little bit brighter. I could do that as well. This is adding the depth to the image. So I think I want to kind of keep it maybe just lower the saturation, just a hair. There we go. That has adjusted the color, but it's adjusted the color of that one hue all over the image and changed it to be a little bit more in line with what I want. I could also change the greens. Maybe I wanted the greens to be lighter. These are really dark. I could go Image Adjustment, replace color, use the dropper tool to choose the screen. Then I can lower the saturation, make it brighter, like that. Make it more sage. The whole thing is a little bit more pastel. So that works for me. All right, so I can save this out. I'll save a copy. How I save it is I just grab the title of the previous one that I did by clicking on it. And then I add what I did to it at the end. So indexed. Now if I wanted to put this pattern on something, Let's say I wanted to upload it to Redbubble or upload it to a service, print on demand service. I can go and file new. I'd like to make really big files for that. So I'm gonna do the 13500 by 13, five hundred, one hundred fifty. Then I'm going to go back to my pattern. And I'm going to make a tile of it. So Edit, Define Pattern. Go back to my new open file here. Layer, new fill layer, pattern. Hit. Okay, you'll get the green stuff here. Grab our pattern. Interesting, I don't I don't think I took it off of index color because I'm getting a white background. Story of my life. Let me go back to my original image mode. We went to an RGB. That's what happens. It's stuff weird stuff happens like that. And what happened was it had a solid background and it looked funny. So let's define the pattern, not when it's indexed. Edit define pattern. We want it defined as an RGB file. Now Layer, New Fill Layer Pattern. Grab our non-indexed one. There we go. Now we have a transparent background. And I can use this slider to make it smaller, like that, or I can make it bigger somewhere in there. It looks good to me. Now if I want to go ahead and add a background layer, I can do that if I want to add a background color. Right now it's got a transparent background, which is fine. I always like to keep it transparent option. I wonder if I saved my index1. Let me, let me save this one. Makes sure that it's saved as not indexed image. We're just going to do this again here. We're gonna save it and override it, will say replace you up. It will save as an indexed image, but you have limited, limited options for editing it and working with it. So he just want to make sure you save it as RGB. Alright, so now we can add a background layer. Let's see what color we want to do as a background. I'm gonna grab my color swatch tool, grab a pink color in here and maybe make it lighter. We'll try a background layer like that. Solid color. Hit OK, and we'll pull this down underneath it. That would be a pink pink background. We can make it closer to white, like a softer paint. You have a white background. Kind of more grayish. We can even go in here and change it to green. Can't keep the same green though. So we'd have to lighten it up. I kind of like this. I like it on and sort of a charcoal like a pink on a charcoal color. Maybe a slightly greenish charcoal color. That might be pretty far more dramatic look. Then you can just save out all the different background colors that you find appealing. But if you have hex numbers or colors that you'd like to use a lot. You can always go ahead and save these hex numbers somewhere. Like this is for d5, 048. If you like that color, you can just save it somewhere, just in a note. You can dial that color in if you want to later. I think maybe just a lighter lighter gray. I think I want to keep this kind of light. I'm gonna go back to pink. I like I like pink colors. Maybe like a pinky gray. That's appealing to me. I like tone on tone. Like it's being not so it's all personal and do a lot of different things. Anyway. So File Save Copy. And again, I just copy that and change it to four POD or print on demand. It's nice, big file. I can fit more products. You'll have to check with your printing stuff at a different print on demand company. Check to see what their max file is. Usually I go in and look and see what they want for king size do Bayes, what covers a king size do a, and then I choose that size to repeat my pattern for. Anyway, that's from start to finish. I'm making a little English rose pattern. Lots of ways that you can customize this to your own personal style. And I hope you enjoyed. Thanks, buh-bye. 28. Long Form: Complete Rose Version Two: So this is kind of a part two to the previous edit. I wasn't 100% satisfied with it. And you'll find this happens frequently. You might make a pattern and it just doesn't sing for you as much as you'd like it to, which is totally fine because what floats your boat may not float someone else's and vice versa. And sometimes I find the patterns that I'm like, I don't really like it that much. Some people really like it and other people don't. So as with everything like clothing and interior design, there's a lot of variances of opinion. So I came back at it with another take and I thought I just share. I'm always thinking about what am I going to use this pattern for? What is the inspiration for it? Usually I'm thinking of things like duvet covers, but sometimes I think of things like a mug or a water bottle or something like that. And so I try not to get myself to stuck in one vein. What I did was I decided to tackle this and I edited each flower leaf with an effect and snap art. Let me just kind of show you closer. I want to just make this bigger so you can see it. And it's just kind of a stylized look. I think it's called stylized and snap art. And I used white lines and it's very abstract. Obviously it doesn't look like the photo, but it works well for me for for patterns because it prints pretty well. Still use color index on this because there still are too many hues for my taste. But anyway, let's go from there. So what I did was I just drug, I dragged drug. All of my little icons from the folder, which has everything processed the same way here I have a happy little Dalia process that way. And this is what a close-up of the rose looks like. I have them in there. I drag them on to the to the 13,500 by 13,500 square background. And there they are. Now I can start to rearrange them. I think I'm gonna do a little rearranging without Pattern Preview on. I'm just going to hit Command T. And because these are processed in such a way as they are, I'm able to definitely go in and make the bigger they expand better. I lost my train of thought there. I was thinking about something else. They let you make them bigger without too much loss of the Lucknow. This one I brightened with a curves adjustment and so it's quite a bit brighter than the rest. Not sure how I feel about it. Like I maybe should have done something else there that we'll see. I'm going to pull that one down as you bring it up to cover up that third one. Just the leaf set. I might move that off to the side. Sorry. Phone telling me people are coming and going. Let's do this one command. I might flip this horizontal and put it on top of the stem of this one. I'm kind of doing a train here. There's a lot of different ways that you can tackle patterns. And this train look is one that I really like. It's pretty straightforward. You don't have to see That's the leaf. We're gonna skip that. It's not a complicated way of thinking about things. How can I bring these things together? This one's pretty similar to that one. I'm just kind of weaving it around. Unlike an a snake a little bit. Not really like a snake, but I'm just sort of dragging each icon. Maybe horizontal. There's nothing set in stone about how I tackle these things at all. It's just sort of working by feel. There are people who liked things really rigid, like a very on purpose half-drop repeats where everything is very, very precise. I don't really work that way very well. It doesn't jive with my beat, two different drum kind of philosophy. I like it to feel good and I go very much by the shapes that are presented by each object and the eye. Since I'm not a photo, since I'm a photo centric pattern designer versus a, an artist who draws. I'm really dependent on manipulating the shapes of the things that I photograph and the natural arch and bent and the way things work together, It's like a puzzle to me. Whereas if you're drawing, you're much more inclined to be of the mind that you're creating with the intent to have things work together. I wonder if that's too close. I don't want it to be I want a little breathing room there. But not quite that much stem. For this one, I'm going to copy it Command J, command T, just to make sure I have another one to work with. Then for this one, which is the one below it, I believe. Yeah, I'm going to take my eraser tool or actually we're going to just use a mask with a black brush. And I'm going to just erase the extra here. Let me use a hard brush at a 100% to make sure that I erase it all. This is the original. Where do I want to put that one? I can maybe make that smaller bit horizontally. Think it's too close to the, the one that we just did. So maybe go like this and put it down here. Now I'm getting to the point where I probably could go ahead and do pattern preview. Because I want to start going over the edge. It takes a bit for it to pop on. There we go. Command T. Now, this one is the extra that I'm going to just put down here and fit into this area. Or maybe I need to go over here with it. I'm trying to see where it fits best. See how we're doing as far as connecting. Command T, move this just a hair. I might just have it meet up right to the edge. No one will notice. Yeah, I'm liking this better. What I'm essentially doing is just kind of snaking it altogether and figuring out more loose pattern. The one before was a little bit to wallpaper feeling for me. But again, it's like all personal bent. I personally like things that are more random and not quite as what's the word structured? Maybe. Tuck that one behind. I'm going to drag that down to the bottom. Kind of zip it out here. And I like the balance of this. It's random enough to feel random but loose enough to have a little bit of negative space through the pattern, so it's not quite so busy. This would work as a nice ditsy pattern if you wanted like a shirt or something that is at this size where it's a lot more tiny were and it also works as a big pattern if you wanted to say, have it be what? Wrapping paper. But this one up here in the corner, the one that I've started with. I just had to figure out where it is. Because unfortunately, my I could I could rename all these layers, which would be a super help, but I haven't. I'm going to make this slightly bigger, but I'm going to also bring it in a touch so there's a little bit more breathing room between the two that yeah, I like that better. There's still quite a bit of negative space happening throughout here. So there is breathing room. I'm just seeing if there's anything I want to make bigger or smaller. Like I said, I could save this out as a PSD, in which case it would be really easy for this to be saved and manipulated later. But I don't tend to do that. I probably should consider it more often, but I'm not a fan of tweaking things after the fact. If it weren't for client work, of course, I probably would save the PSD hands down. No problem. But the creative part of me likes to just start over. If I'm feeling that I need to use those elements. And that's the beauty of all of this, is you can go in and change elements and read you use the same elements. So I'm going to look at this as I was just talking there. I was noticing that this one is so much lighter, I might actually go in and do a curves adjustment on it. Let's see if I can find that one. Where did it go? I must have missed it. Here we go again. There we go. I missed it twice. Command M. I'm just going to darken it up a little bit. Just kind of make it fit a little bit better. And then Command U. I'm going to increase the saturation of it. Too much. Try to increase the saturation. Maybe. No, I don't like that either. Cancel. It's making the greens just way too intense. So another thing I could do is let's just paint on some color. I'm gonna do a spare layer here. Before I do that, let's save as Pattern Preview. I'm going to, since I'm going to be doing something that's not conventional, we're going to merge these layers to connect them all at a blank layer above. Turn off Pattern Preview. It's all contained in that. I'm going to grab this color right here. One of these peachy colors. Grab a brush. This time it's gonna be probably a soft brush and I'm going to be using soft light mode. Let's see what happens. I'm just intensifying the color. Maybe overlay. Let's try overlay. This is what it looks like with normal. I could do color, which works as well. I could use do not multiply. Overlay, soft light, hard light, soft light or overlay. That adds a little bit more of a pop. That one doesn't have to be exactly the same. I just wanted it to be a little bit more intense. There's quite a bit of shadow on some of these depending on how I photograph them. But I liked the variation. Let's do emerging of that. I'm doing index color anyway, so let's see what happens there. But first I'm gonna save this out. I'll save a copy. This is the original. I'll say white line pale roses. Let's see. Original. All right, So then let's do the index color after this saves. One of the things I noticed about the color palette is we have this deep olive right here of these roses. And these roses here have more Kelly green bright colors. So I want to minimize the amount of greens and try to bring those together into a more limited color palette. We'll see what happens when we index the color. It may not work as good as I wanted it to with a straight-up photos that we did with oil paint, filter, index color, and really gave us a blocky, a very loose interpretation of roses. We'll see if that happens with this version. So let's do command J just as a copy, just to see mode index color. I forgot this one always wants merged layers. My bad. At 11 colors, we end up with nothing with this one, it just kind of disappears. Let's try 14. Oops. It's very slow. 14. And now we're ending up with no colors there. I might, contrary to what I just said, I might actually have to put a new blossom had on this one because it's just not cooperating very well. It did bring the greens closer. Let's just cancel this out. It's not working like I'd like it to. So let me go in here and grab my flower. That is that one right here. See which one is it? Is it this? No, it's not that I think it's this one. I'm going to open this one in Photoshop and we're going to reprocess this one and maybe just take the head off of it and put it on top of the other one. Let's go in and I'm going to run my action, which is my white lines action which uses Snap art. It's going to apply it and it's going to save it and it's going to replace it in the file that we just opened. Then it closes it out. So let's go back to my white line snap art folder. And this is the version that it made. It's a little dark, which I think is why I made it lighter to begin with. Let's try again. I know this might seem really tedious and boring, but it's good to see the problems too. So this is the curves command, M is the command to get that to open. On a Mac. I'm going to make it just a bit brighter. I want to go to right with it. Now we'll try the white lines, navbar it again. Which again is going to, with this particular action is going to save over the top of and replace the one that's already there, but I don't like the one that's there and I have another copy elsewhere. See if that's better. All right, let's open that with Photoshop. And I'm going to just take my lasso tool and grab around this Layer via Copy command C, command V to paste Command T to transform. I'm just going to be lazy about this and just replace the whole thing with this one. Because I like this better. I'm just going to go right on top of it. I'm going to lower the opacity a little bit so I can see what I'm doing here. Mine is a lot bigger than the original, so I'm going to bring that bring this in a little bit. I'm trying to match it up as best as possible. Hard to tell which is which. So I'm going to click that, replaced the opacity. And we're gonna call that good. I liked that being a little bit more intense than it was before. Tweaking, tweaking, tweaking. Let's do view pattern preview, see how that looks. And mass. Hey, good. Take that off. Now if I wanted to kind of reduce the color palette or change a color palette, Let's do use replace color. I'm gonna go to Image Adjustments, replace color. What I want to do is replace this olive tone down here with this green tone. Let's go down here. The result, like Okay, Double-click to undo. It's picked that Let's do hue. Light color. Doesn't appear that it worked. Let's try it again. Image Adjustments, replace color, maybe make it lighter. It doesn't appear to be doing any of that. Just so weird. Let's try it one more time and not use the color picker. I'm not sure what was going on there. We'll use the original one to choose the olive color. And now I will just use the hue slider here. Because really it should be showing on here that's changing that color. But it doesn't appear to be doing anything really. Completely looks like the original. Let's merge this together. I'm gonna save this out because I read it, I redid it and we're going to just save it on top of this one because I redid the little head of that one rose and I like this better. I was wondering if I opened up a file that was new that I saved. If I wonder if I'm still an index color, am I still an index color? That's added save and we'll see. One of the things that can happen when I just experienced, I'm thinking this is the problem. If you don't go back to RGB color after you've done index color, it won't just give you a warning and say you need to be an RGB in order to do this, you'll just have to remember, Oh, I was playing with index color and that makes everything else not work. Okay, So Image mode, I'm in RGB, so it should have worked fine. I take that back, but do know that index color can cause issues. So let's open this up. Open it up. Going to sort by date added. Open this with Photoshop. I'm trying to open up a different file to see if color replace a work better. Image adjustments. Replace color. All right, Now it's working. You can see that it's splotchy down there. If I add the lightness, you can see that it's just adding like splotchy Venus to it. So let's try the darker tone here. You see it's not selecting. Let's maybe do the whole thing. Let's do this whole leaf here. We're getting a little closer. Alright, so it's selected the whole thing here. Selecting all these dark leaves, those tones within the dark leaves. Now we can start to bring things closer together. This is getting much closer. Now. I'm getting, now I'm happier. Now. The color is working. Finally, it's still a little bright for me. I'm still going to reduce the saturation overall. But I brought these two greens closer together with image address at an image adjustment, replace color and for whatever reason it wasn't working over here at this version. And sometimes Photoshop will do that. And I was going to cut all this out, but I left it because it's a common problem. And it's not always your fault. Sometimes the program just doesn't want to run. Opening up a new, fresh file can restore things, and that's what happened in this case. Now I'm going to make another copy just in case I screw this up. Filter, camera Raw Filter. I'm also noticing about a little space there between the two, but I'm not going to worry about it. I'm gonna go to greens and lower the, lower the saturation and the greens. But now it's a lot more cohesive, feels a lot more cohesive illuminance before it has a lot more yellow in it. And here it's a lot more muted. I'm debating. The yellow and green and red and pale green and pink are on opposite ends of the spectrum. I think that might be too cool, so I'm actually going to just lower the opacity and kinda do somewhere in the middle. So we'll do 50% of that one. I like that emerge again. You could save it as a PSD along any of these steps. Then I'm just going to save this out. Not sure how many colors we have in this. We could try index color again. Let me just do that one more time. I want to just try index color again. Image Adjustments. What was I doing? Oh, mode, sorry, tired this morning. That's actually looking better because I have fewer colors in the green. To get 11 colors is looking pretty good, although we ended up with green here in the shadows versus pink. Not a big problem because I could select that and then replace it and then use a mask to only apply it to that area, which I might do. Let's show how to do that. I'm gonna hit Okay, so this is my index color version. I've had I have one saved before. Did I save it out? Let me save this out. File. Save a Copy. Then I'm going to replace original with indexed or no, this is original with the reins modified. I'll know that that's what that means. It's taking a while to save. I appreciate your patients with these long-form videos. The point of them is to let you experience the ins and outs and the issues that arise and the challenges and all of that in real time so that you don't see this spiffed up fast version of everything going well and no problems. And then be left with a bunch of questions as to why you're running into issues. There are many. Alright, so I'm going to go to Edit, redo index color to put that back. Alright, so now I want to replace this green right here, and I'm going to have to go into RGB mode. First. Make a duplicate copy just to have a backup. Image Adjustments replace color. What I'm gonna do is choose the original color here, and I'm going to replace it with this pink, dark pink color like that. Now I'm only going to be using it right in this area, not anywhere else. I wanted to replace it exactly. Oops, that was not what I wanted to do. Image replace color. I always forget that I don't want to be fussing with things too much when I'm replacing color because I want to keep it at that 11 colors that I started with. Sorry, I wanted to do this one and replace it with this. It's not really looking like the same color. Not sure why. Guess we do have to work with a saturation a little bit. I might end up with 12 colors because of that, but, oh, well, no worries. We're still within the range of what I wanted to be. I want to be under 15 colors. What I'm gonna do is add a layer mask, invert that layer mask Command. I. Then use my brush to just paint with a white brush at a 100% opacity onto this area to add that back just to that one little point. That looks better and merge. That's the index version for those that want to have fewer colors to work with. Then we have the regular version. Let's just save this as a copy text. Save beings. Alright, so that is the final pattern. If you wanted to add a background color, you could save it out with a background color. In this case, I'm guessing I probably would just go with white. Solid color. I'd like to just do white on this one. Anything else I think is going to compete a lot or a soft gray would be nice with it as well. This space is bugging me right here. If you find something like that that's bothering you. You could use a paintbrush to add a little line right here to connect the two. I'm at. Actually go up here with an eraser and just make it look a little bit more intentional. And then let's see. I don't know if I want to connect them or not. Debating what I want to do there. If it even bothers me or not. I don't think I'm just gonna see what it looks like if I take this off and just leave it be something like a negative space there. I actually like that better. I feel like having this stem just sort of hanging out there feels imbalanced or something. I think it looks better that way. You pattern preview just to take a beat. Yeah. It feels like it has a nice little, little zigzaggy flower pattern happening there which is nicely repeated. Yeah, I think that looks better. Tweaking, tweaking, lots of tweaking. Alright. I'm really I'm leaving now. All right, Thanks everybody. Thank you for bearing with me and put these videos at the end. Very reason. Things. 29. Adding Line Drawings : In this video, I wanted to show you how to add a little bit visual interests behind your main pattern. Here I've constructed a pattern of echinacea or cone flowers and a couple of white style flowers. And I've done it just like I've done in the previous videos. I cut out the individual elements in Photoshop and then put them into this square using Pattern Preview as my guide. And then I saved it out as a PNG. So this is a PNG. Now, I want to turn the square like 90 degrees and then create a little bit of a shadow or some visual interest in the background. So it isn't just plain, solid color back there. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to delete this layer here. I have hanging on there. What I'm gonna do is just duplicate the layer starting from the beginning, I'm just going to Command J. So now I have a duplicate layer and then I'm going to just rotate that. So Command T and I'm going to rotate it 90 degrees. Now it looks pretty messy. And I'm going to turn off my main layer that I just have this one layer which is turned 90 degrees. And now I want to do some kind of a line drawing effect with it. What I've done is I've gone in here and went to my color picker. And I want to make my foreground color white. In this case, it's not quite white. I think I chose the straw flower color, but we're going to just keep it pure and just go white. Then I chose a pink color from within the Echinacea or the cone flowers. This is important because I'm gonna be using something and filter gallery that will use these colors as the basis. Set up your colors. You can also invert them. I could do white on pink. Pink on white. You'll see in a second. What I'm going to do is go to Filter, Filter Gallery. And remember you have to have eight bit in order for filter gallery to work. So if you don't have, it's showing up, if it's grayed out, you want to go to mode and then make sure that you hit eight bits so that it works. Now I'm gonna do fit in view. And you can see here that we have basically a white and pink line drawing. Now it's important that you're pretty picky about which filters you use because if there's any kind of lighting effects, then your pattern is it going to duplicate? So for instance, if you would have a lighting pattern on this, some of these like add a light effect, like if this part of the straw flower was really bright and then the little petal that comes over the edge is dark. It won't blend. There'll be a line there. Anyplace something crosses over here we have part of the second Ayesha flower. If it's really bright and this one's dark, there'll be a line and it won't work. We have to make sure that things are nice and even in order for this to work and have it repeat, well, what I'm using here is called photocopy. That one just uses two colors. You can change the amount of detail and darkness by using the slider. So if you wanted to have it be darker, you can move the slider back and it's going to introduce more of that dark pink color and less of the white. And if you move it over, it takes some of that out. You can increase the amount of detail that is in there. And I don't think it I think you can go all the way and it just makes a really detailed drawing line drawing there. You can just find a happy medium and then hit Okay. I can show you quickly what I don't want to do. Boss or bas-relief is the one that I've used in the past and its cause problems because it has very light areas and then darker areas. And so when I go to make a repeat of it, it it doesn't repeat well because the colors aren't lining up. So avoid that one. Let me go back to photocopy and let that render and then hit Okay. Just takes a second for it to finish and hit. Okay. Now this is underneath the main one. It's on top right now I'm gonna pull it down underneath and then you can work with blend modes. Now I haven't added a background color yet and that will make a big difference. I'm going to add a blank layer, bring that down to the bottom, and then I have to pick a color for my background layer. Let's just say I'm going to use white. It's already selected, so I'm just going to choose a solid color and that puts white in the background. Now I can go up here and I can determine do I want to change the blend mode. I can go through and see if one works better than another because I have a white background, it's gonna be harder. Let's pick a different color so you can see the variation. So maybe if we picked, Let's go with a darker pink. Maybe if I went with this darker pink color, I could choose different blend modes for this, this is multiply which kind of overlays the pink color with the darkness. I can use screen which makes it white. The course I can lower the opacity. So linear, lighter color looks kind of neat there as a background and I could lower the opacity on it so that it's not competing so much. You can do a lot of things, but I think I want a white background with this. I'm going to put it back to white. Then with this, I'm going to choose either normal color. I think, I think that's gonna be the one that's going to work so you can even get really wild with it. Like difference. Luminosity is interesting because that makes it gray. Which might be interesting. I could do that. Maybe lower the opacity on it to just have a line drawing in the background. Underneath the picture. It just adds a little bit of visual interests. If I go to View pattern preview, actually let's turn that off and do it that way. View Pattern Preview. And it's highlighting the circle, but you can see how it has the little line drawing through it. And I kind of like that. I think that is working here. It's not introducing a lot of extra color into the mix, so it's a subtle thing. You can also go ahead and continue to turn it. So Command T, maybe I want to go 90 degrees again with it. I'm trying to get this one over here. Let's go 90 degrees one more time. Maybe like that. I kind of echoes everything around. I like that better. Visually balanced. You have a bigger thing and then the bigger area of negative space. And you can see all the shapes. I like that. I think that'll work in it. It just it feels good to me. And of course, if you change the color and if I went slightly off white with it, it changes the look of it. Here's yellow. Here's a green color, kind of a light gray. I've been liking great colors lately. Let's grab this pink and maybe go to pinky gray. Kind of a mauve, mauve tone. Anyway, you can play around with that, but that is how to add visual drama to your pattern. I'm going to continue to play until I hit the color that I want for my final background. But of course I can save this as a PSD so I can continue to play with other versions later. Alright, thanks everyone. Bye bye. 30. Reduce Chaos w/ Gradient Maps and Filters: In this video, I want to go over how you can minimize some of the chaos of color when you're making a pattern. In this example, what I've done is simply dropped and I dragged different flowers into the scene. I used Pattern Preview to do it as you've seen me use before. And this time I used a rectangle. So at 7 thousand pixels wide by 10 thousand pixels high on a transparent background was my new document. And then I just pulled images from my file or folder into the scene. Now, I wasn't very careful about color palette. I wasn't even really careful about placement. I was more looking just to fill all the space. And I'm going to talk about inspiration in another video. But for this one, I was going for what they often call a ditsy pattern. Which if you see a sun dress or like something that has a small flower pattern, it's going to fill in all the spaces and look quite, quite subtle. In this case, it doesn't look subtle at all, but we're going to take care of that and make it more subtle by using gradient maps to recolor our images. So what I'm gonna do here is just hit turn off Pattern Preview. What I did was I dropped and dragged everything into the scene and then I merged all the layers. And just to create that, my tile square, I'm gonna go up here and turn off Pattern Preview. And then I'm gonna look at my pattern here to see if there's anything that needs to be erased or fixed. I do have some extra layers here that I'm going to delete just because I was trying to play with different options, but I only need one layer. And then I did go ahead and just add another background color, but using the solid color option here. When I turn that on, you can see that I have a background color and the reason I do this, and you may have seen me do it before, is to just make sure that I don't have any cutouts that have stray pixels or background information that I need to erase. What I did notice in here was that I have a little stem cutoff very abruptly, so I want to erase that. So I'm just gonna go in with my eraser tool and make sure it's a hard brush with no feathering. Because I don't want it to have a soft edge. I want to make it just blend right in with a hard edge of the petals. I'm just gonna go in here and erase any stray pixels. Make it smaller, and just make a triangle here. Honestly, this isn't going to show much at the end. I just wanted to remove anything that looks odd like here I see I've got some of my background that's showing that's not a petal. You can remove stuff like that, but really it's not gonna be a big deal. Here's my background. I'm not going to be using this background layer initially. So I'm gonna turn it off because I want to neutralize all of this color and go a little bit more monochrome with it. We're going to again, we're gonna do that with a gradient map. I'm going to choose my colors from my gradient map. You can go ahead and do that down here in your color swatches, or you can just hit Gradient Map and then there is a menu upsets a gradient wrong. One. Gradient map is down here. You see that it put in the colors that I had in my color swatches. But if you double-click on it, you will open up window, a window here where you can choose an open, different pre-made options. You can click around if you're feeling uninspired and don't know what colors you want. You can do that. What I'm gonna do is cancel that because I want to choose my own colors first. So I'm gonna delete that and do it again just for ease. I'm going to put it in the colors I want. So let me see here. So let's just do a blue and white pattern. I might have to invert these. I'm gonna do this one as white. And then we'll do the background color as that sort of blue, navy like that, and then go down to gradient map. Okay, So I think I need to, I don't know, sometimes it looks like negative, like you would with film. This works okay, but I think I might invert them, so let's just do this again. I'm gonna do it manually so that you can watch me do it. I can just hit the little arrow icon here and reverse them. And then gradient map. That looks better to me. Because I want the white and highlights, not the blue in the highlights. And I always forget which side needs to be white in order for that to happen. Now I can, I can go ahead and adjust some make some changes to how this looks. And I could do that a million different ways, but I could go in here and just use a curves layer, maybe make it a little bit more intense. I could bring up the highlights if you're familiar with curves, if you've taken any of my Lightroom courses or Photoshop or anything from me, you'll know what's going on here. And I can even map the shadows. I can deepen the shadows. I can play around with this, whatever. Looks good to you. I can even go so far as to take this into. Adobe Camera Raw Filter and adjusted there. Lots of things that I could do. Now let's add the background to it. And you see that it has all of the flowers in a monochrome fashion. I just randomly picked the color for the, for the flowers and that worked out. Great. Actually. Let's look at the pattern preview. This is a lot more monochrome. You can see this on a sun dress. You can see this on a wallpaper, perhaps. If it's too contrasty, you can always take off the curves which mutes it down, makes a little bit more soft and light. That's totally up to you. The more you subdue it, the more it looks like a line drawing. I mean, even though all these are straight-up photo is mostly looking at it here. It looks very, very reserved. But this, this is a pattern that could be a big wallpaper or wrapping paper if it was at this scale, but more like a sun dress or maybe some wallpaper at this scale. Lots of different options that is markedly different than the original, which is quite chaotic and busy. The options for muting colors are to go into something like Adobe Camera Raw and use a profile or to use selective color and kind of shift and massage the colors that you have. But this is one of the ways that you can go ahead and just make it monochrome. You're not limited of course to this blue. I'm going to turn this off and add another gradient map. Let's add it. Let's do a different color. So let's say we wanted to pale yellow. So let's go in here and grab this yellow. Whoops, I got to be on the right layer here. Let's go in and grab this pale yellow from this big own. Yeah. Maybe brighten it up there. And then white. Because the gradient map affects the whole thing, it does affect the background. You can see that it does look different when you don't have the background on there. But when I put the background back on the gradient map changes the background color. But you can see this is another option. And then if I add those curves layer back in, it intensifies it. This is a little harder to see. Let's just adjust the color here. Let's double-click on that. You can always adjust the color by going and just clicking on the end of the gradients and then grabbing the little swatch. He's kind of a multi click type thing. But this is more of like a mustard E 70s color, kind of pinky brown or pq. I don't know. You can see more of the details there because it's darker. That's how you play with it. Really not difficult at all. And you can more or less change any, any different look to something different. Let's look at another way. Let's turn this off. Let's choose some other colors I'm going to show you. I did this in another video where we added lines behind a video or behind the video. I'm recording a video, sorry, tired this morning, where I added lines behind the pattern. And we can do that with the entirety of the pattern. So let's show you how to do that. Again, Let's pick our colors. In this case, I'm saying I want to do white on top and yellow at the bottom. We're going to leave the background as blue. So I'm gonna go click on the layer above the colored flowers and go to filter, filter gallery. Now it doesn't support filter gallery and Pattern Preview. So you know that do fit in view. You can see that we have a line drawing. Now, I've had this discussion before and to reiterate, we don't want any kind of filter that's going to have a gradient on top of it where say, part of a flower will be light and part of it will be dark. That would be bad. We want everything to be seamless, so we want it to be even colored. And some of these will add a gradient, the bas-relief. If we look at that one, we'll add a darker and lighter areas. In this case, it's not really showing that way, but in some it's very pronounced where there's many shades of the particular color with different amounts of shadow added and it doesn't work. Just keep that in mind. This one is the photocopy option, which tends to work pretty well. And then you can add the amount of details. Do you want more details in it or less details? And then the darkness, we can turn that off which, which makes it very dark. Or we can move it all the way over, which lightens it up and adds more of the white into it. Again, you can invert those colors. You could have the yellow on top and the white on the bottom. It's all in what you want to accomplish. Max detail hit Okay. And let it, let it render. And the reason you're seeing a bigger part of the the If sometimes when you use the filters, it will show things that are crossing the barrier of the line and it will show that in its entirety. So it doesn't always just the tile, but we're going to crop it to the tile when we're done. Let's look at that. You could reduce the opacity of it. You could also change the blend mode, blend mode of it. Like in multiply, It's like a dark blue on blue screen is going to be pretty light lightened, is going to color dodge is a weird. You can just scroll through and see if any of these change. The look like this is totally different with vivid Light. It's like a green on blue. Pin light is a little bit more intense. That's pin like, I actually kinda like the pin light lobe here compared to our original. That's normal. And then pin light is a little bit more intense. Difference actually doesn't look too bad. Remembering that all of these things are interacting with the color at the bottom. The color that you have at the bottom is going to make a difference. If we went in here and change this color to white and turned it on wherever we go there and change it to normal. This is a very, a very light pattern, almost hard to see. But this might be really neat on a linen textured wallpaper or a very subtle fabric pattern. It's reducing the colors so much that it's almost hard to see. Maybe not white. Let's try. Let's go back to maybe blue here. We can change, change the look of it. Sees a pen light is like a pink on blue when we change the background color to that blue color. So whenever you change the background, it's going to change the blend mode and how it looks. You can click around on black, It's yellow. Up here on lighter blue, it's pink. This is working in pin light mode, so you can play with your different blend modes. I saw something. Oh, luminosity is a fun one too. Because luminosity is going to really blend well with whatever colors you have there. Divide looks neat. That really brings out the detail. Tone on tone. Difference kind of gives you that 70s vibe. Anyway, I'll let, I'll stop it there. But this is how you can reduce those colors and change the way everything looks. Yeah, it's pretty fun. Back to normal. And if you want to go back to the original because I went ahead and change that, I can go back in here to one of my history. I used the history panel here to find before I started to add different colors to put it back to the original, because I haven't saved this out, so I wanted to do that before I quit. Anyway. The history panel is a great way to bought back and forth between your different things that you did like that. You can kind of go in here and move it around and remember what you did before. All right, thank you, everybody. Have fun. 31. Wallpaper Inspired Video Leaf Stripe: One of the things you might want to consider is creating patterns that have very specific repeats. And I don't go into that heavily because there are lots and lots of tutorials for Illustrator if you're working in that program and even there's ones out there for Photoshop as well. I don't tend to like patterns match that, have really heavy repeats that look really predictable. So I don't usually make those a lot myself, but if you like that kind of thing, if you want to have a very particular type of repeat, getting some inspiration is helpful because you can have a visual reference to how you want to place your things. I'm here on the Magnolia us wall decor. And I just looked up some wall coverings because I'd like to mimic wall covering patterns and they're pretty subtle here. This is from the Magnolia network. And I like these patterns. I use this as an example in another video of just a single icon that's repeated over and over again, would you absolutely can do. And that's the motive motif approach, where you make one particular item and then you repeat that over and over. So you make one really pretty icon or motif and then go ahead and repeat that. But there, then there are the ones that have lots of things going on in them like this pattern, which is really cool and it looks neat on different colors. So this is something you could think of. And again, you don't have to use florals. You could take pictures of lots of things and make patterns from them. But what I wanted to show you with, this is how there are a lot of striped patterns that have a wave to them. This is another one of that one. And Let's see, they come in lots of different colors. And this is another one where things kind of have a vertical flow to them. Another option is one that has these big massive flowers. If you look at this one, this makes it large motif that's repeated in kind of a, a stripe pattern. If you wanted to do something like that. Let's go ahead and do that. So I'm just going to make a square because that's usually where I start with a transparent background. We can make a stripe pattern. Let's go ahead and do view Pattern Preview. Oops, that's not what I wanted to do. I hit the wrong thing, view Pattern Preview. And I'm going to go in here and to my cutouts folder, I ended up moving it to a separate place because it was getting so big. So here's my cutouts. And let's do leaves. Let's do some leaves. If I wanted to make a leaf pattern that's repeated, I'm going to look for one that is a good candidate, maybe this one here. And I could literally just do it like this. I could, I could have the wallpaper be like this. This is how simple it can be. Then you can go in and change the orientation. Having a non-responsive program, apparently. Let's maybe do that. Then I can drag and something else. Let's see here. Maybe this this looks like a dahlia leaf. And what kind of put it up like sort of connect the two. Like that. There we have a striped pattern. You can do lots of different way integrations. I could put a flower in here, I can continue with leaves. I could even go ahead and drag another one in. That, that might be complimentary. We'll just get really, well. Let's do different textures so I could add my fern in. Drag that to the bottom. It's behind. You. See if you go on and on like this. Now let's say I wanted to fill in some of this space. If I didn't want them to be as small as this, I can just fill in the space that we're given. To make it a little bit more. See how are overlapping. We don't want to overlap our square. So for this instance, I'm going to put this back where I had it and then turn off pattern preview so I can work within my square. We're going to fill in the square almost completely with our pattern. This with our make everything kind of big. We're making a motif that's filling up more space. This is gonna do is bring the pattern closer together. Now it seems more like a square, so now I can fill in the gaps with other things to continue my stripe pattern like in this area, in this area. But I've brought the two closer together by filling in the majority of the square. So I can either duplicate what I have or I can bring in something else here. Let's see what other leaves. Let me go back to my, well, this one's kind of cool. I will bring that one in. This is a rose leaf that's sort of on its side that maybe some of them aren't showing up here. Let's go back to flowers. I had some leaves. I talked in here because I was getting lazy when it came to putting them in their proper folders. You just get tired and it was easier to find them. This way. I want this one to be over the top of the very first one that we did. So I'm going to drag it up. Then I want Let's see here. This is one I want it to cover up the bottom. I might, I might erase part of this one. It's a smart object. So when you use a layer mask with my brush and the black brush, we want the brush to be hard so that we don't have a soft line. I'm just going to remove blend it in. There. This is a little busier pattern, but it makes a nice vertical, vertical propelled type a pattern. Now at this point, I can merge. Merge layers again, you can save it as a PTSD at this point if you wanted to go back and do more. Now I can work with the coloring on it. Let's maybe we did in a previous video, we did a gradient map. I'm going to use white at the top and choose maybe this dark green. Go ahead and add another layer and add a gradient map. I guess I didn't need to add the extra layer. This might be a nice tone on tone version. Oh, I know I added an extra layer because I wanted to add a background color. That's why I added a white background color. I could see what it looks like. Because I've got the gradient map on, it's going to adjust everything that's dark. All right, so in this case it's actually kind of a blue color. We won't get too much into layer masks, but not until your masks, we won't get too much into gradient maps. But in this case, in order to change the background color it actually the blue when we have the gradient map on there with the color. So this is what we'd save as a PSD to get this effect. I really like that. I think that's beautiful. Might need a little bit more contrast, but I actually like the tone on tone. So I'm gonna take off the pattern preview, view, Pattern Preview. Save this out. Save a copy. Go to my patterns and then I'm going to do this as leaf stripe, horizontal. Hit Save. I can actually save this as a PSD as well. I will save this as a PSD to, but I really like this tone on tone. Look, I think it's really pretty great for wallpaper. I am noticing something's happening over here. I'm not sure what other videos you may have seen me talk about double-checking on cutouts, being really, really clean and good. And it looks like some part of the cut-out here is not looking so good. Filter, review, Pattern Preview. Let's look and see if it's worked out what it looks like. There's a little bit of there's a dust spot here. So I'm gonna do some general cleanup on this file right here. It looks like there might be some can happen in here that shouldn't be happening. So I'm gonna save this as a PNG and I'll show you how to clean that up. So what I'd put it, everything back on with just the background. You can see it. See there's something happening right here that I don't like that happen. So we're gonna, we're gonna just isolate our layer File, Save a Copy, and we're gonna do this one. Leaves stripe horizontal. I'm gonna say fix original. Just that I know that it wasn't in the completed stage. Let's open that up again. Go to our patterns. One thing that drives me crazy about Max is that it doesn't ever remember sometimes where you were. I want to just double-click this and open it up. And again, I'm going to use that incident alpha to see if I can isolate the problem. For whatever reason it seems like it went backwards. That's so weird. Anyway, whatever week we're going to clean this up. Go to the markup and instant Alpha. I'm going to delete that. That removes that. I think I got rid of it. We'll go over here just to make sure that we don't have any stray weirdness that's happening. Just to clean that up, then I can just click out of it because it's going to save it. Now I'm going to just drag that one that I fixed into the document. Turn off the one that we had before and now turn back on our Layers and see if it fixed it. It fixed the problem. Weird. Isn't that weird? Weird. Just I think there was another little thing that I needed to get rid of. It may have been covered up by something because see, when I was looking at this original, if I open it back up, there was a little bit of something right here, but I think it might be part of the repeat. Yeah, it is. It's very tip of this leaf is repeated over here in our tile, so it's not a problem. It just looked like one initially there. So now I can save this. There's still some there, there's a little bit of something is still right here. Darn it. This is this is, this is what you do. You just kind of go through it and fix and tweak. And it's good that you can see some of the issues that I'm having so that you can not have the same problem. Again, you'd have to do this in Photoshop if you were on a PC, unless PC has some option like this, you see the little shadow right there. Just keep cleaning it up until it looks good. Zoom around. I see something up here too. Weird shaped. There. I think I've cleaned it up mostly. It's just it was just a cutout that I didn't do very well. Alright, so we're gonna get rid of these two and pull in the one that I now fixed. Just do it right in there. I did that wrong. My bad. We don't want view Pattern Preview on when we do that. Otherwise, we end up with this overlapping issue that we're having actually worked. Okay. But we don't want it. That looks good. It lined up weird. If I turn that off and I turn this one back on and I turn that one on top of it, you see that they're not quite lined up the same. So I'm gonna delete that layer. Turn off your pattern preview. Take the one that we were doing and just drag it onto here so that it fits exactly. I can take off the other ones. I hope that makes sense. Real-time problem-solving. That's much better. Now I'm gonna save this as my original tile because I've got it fixed, but I'm going to eliminate the layers that are not working. Save this as a PSD horizontal stripe, but this time as a Photoshop file. Then I'm gonna save it again as a PSD to overwrite the one that was wrong. So File Save a Copy. This is the original, and I'm gonna save it as a PSD and it will replace the one that had the air and background that I had to fix. That's how you make a stripe. And this was sort of inspired again by the Magnolia type. Look. If you're working with things like wallpaper versus things like fabric, you might want to be more subtle with it. Some people like really wild wallpaper, it's all personal taste. But I tend to more subtle walls, more calming walls, and I like more excited, vibrant patterns on clothing because that's more temporary. I don't like to walk into a room that overwhelms me with color. It's physically jarring to me personally. We might be the opposite. You might like really subtle closing, really, really vibrant walls, but finding inspiration and then figuring out how you can channel what you're doing with it. And so this was more or less inspired by this kind of pattern or this one. A little bit more tone on tone, a little bit less crazy, a little bit more subtle. This is Mrs. this is Boulder. I like bold patterns versus very tiny, subdued patterns, but this one, I love this one. I think I need to make this sense as wallpaper in a bathroom or something. Anyway, I hope you enjoy. This is my wallpaper inspired video. 32. Adding Vertical Stripes: I saved out the pattern that I did in the previous video and I got to thinking maybe I should add some, some vertical stripes behind the leaf elements to give more of a geometric field to it. What I did was I went ahead and added some stripes. And these are just some white stripes because we're using different blend modes. They are going to show up differently as different colors based on the blend mode. When I put everything back here, remembering that I used a gradient map to use, you can change the colors of the leaf elements. I just, I added the stripes. And so the stripes here are in exclusion mode. And you can see that they are bringing on this kind of hunter green color. I could save this as a PNG and save that out. And then I could potentially add more color to it. Now, remember I have different blend modes for these layers. The gradient map is normal, the leaf is normal, and then I have the stripes as exclusion. If I go back to normal with them. They also, let's see here. They're still white. It just depends on the kind of blend mode that we're using and how everything works together. It can be a little bit confusing. So you just have to kind of play. But I liked these stripes. Now if I go in and I turn this on and I, like I showed you before, I take it down to exclusion mode and makes them very pale and white. If I change it to difference there a little bit brighter. If I go to subtract, they're going to be pure white because they're subtracting all the color from from that layer. You can play with different blend modes and see over soft light is just a light sage green. You can play with different blend modes. You can put them together in different ways. And I wanted to just show you that. So all I did was go through and use the the elliptical tool, which also has the rectangular marquee tool or elliptical. They call it the rectangular marquee tool and the Elliptical Marquee Tool. I use the rectangular one, and I just added various stripes. I didn't want it to be too regimented and regular because i then I would have to get the number grid on and make everything equidistant and space. So I just eyeballed it using different sizes of stripes to be sort of random, which was more inline with me. But if you like things that are a little bit more strict and look very concise, you can go ahead and do that as well. And I could also turn this pattern into just a striped pattern for the wall and save that out as a striped pattern. But when I add in these elements, it changes that. And then when I add the gradient map with a color that I have at changes that again, just lots of different options that you can play with. Adding the gradient map without the leaves just makes a complimentary striped pattern that you can put on the wall. So you can have the leaves without the stripes on one wall. You could have the stripes on another wall. It would all integrate. So I wanted to just throw that out there for everybody to ponder. Alright, Thanks. 33. Making a Texture Seamless for A Pattern Manually: In this lesson, we're going to create a pattern using a couple of different methods. We're going to create a pattern that has more thought and placement involved than the previous things that we've done where it's been more random. And I'm also gonna show you how to make a texture seamless so that you can add it to your image and in your final pattern. So the elements that we're going to use are the Levin, a mess that we did yesterday and this is the one that was processed with the oil paint or I should say in the last video, I recorded it yesterday, but the previous video where we worked with love in the midst. And then this little rose, which is the queen of Sweden rows and I just applied the oil paint filter to it at 100%. I can do that again for you. So you can see when I, how I did that, I just drag it down to the plus sign so I haven't separate layer, Filter, Stylize. We'll paint. And my default settings generally for me are all the way over to the right for the top four and to the left for the bottom slider. The reason being, is I like it to be as painterly as possible. Now, this is a pretty big file. This image is 3,730 pixels wide. It's a pretty big file. Because of that the oil paint filter doesn't distort it too much. If this were a 600 pixel file, it could be really, really smear. And so I might want to make adjustments to it, but for this size of a file, it works great. Because I like how this looks. I'm just going to flatten it. Actually, I'm not going to flatten it. I'm going to merge it. You want to merge visible when you want to preserve the transparency, which is what we wanted to do. So no flattening if we want to do that. Alright, so here are two elements. Now I want to come up with my square and my seamless texture. This is really important to make your textures seamless before you get going if that's what you're going to do. Because if you add a texture later and you don't make it seamless, you are going to have massive issues and it's gonna be a pain in the butt to fix if it's fixable at all. Now, if you choose to have a solid color background, that's no problem, that will just be seamless no matter what. But I like to have some visual interests. So let's work on the prep work for that. First of all, let's get our file ready here. So I'm going to say File New. And I'm going to go with fortunate city, that was my 1200 here. Let's just do 10 thousand by 10,240. And we're going to have a transparent background. This is going to be our repeating pattern square. It's fairly big. Understanding that for most products you might use for print on demand, this might be big enough. You might have to scale it and make it the pattern smaller for things like, uh, do a or a shower curtain, but this is pretty good size. To start. Now I want to apply a texture to this, and so I want to also make it seamless. In order to do that, what I'm gonna do is just make sure I have a collar on here so I can see what I'm doing. Adding any kind of blending mode to a transparent layer doesn't show. We need some color just to lay the foundation. So I'm going to add an extra blank layer and then let's just randomly pick a color. I'm going to just pick a muted green tone on my color picker and then go down here and do solid color. Why am I doing this again, it's just to have something for the texture to stick to. We can always change this color later. I just need color for the texture to show. Now I'm going to go up to my search bar here. Actually let me just go up to the top of my computer. And I'm going to put in spring painterly, which is a collection of textures from flypaper, which is a texture company that I really like. And I'm just waiting for it to show. This is what we want. I might just search through my Dropbox here and have it show up that they're that way. Just for the spring painterly. It's fine. My file folder. More information. All right. There they are. I like this site. They have lots of sets. You can go to fly paper textures, just search them on the Internet. They have lots of fun ones, and they're free or not free. If you buy them, you're free to use them for commercial use. They have a commercial use and license as part of it. So that is very nice to have. You could also make your own, and we can talk about that in another video. Possibly. I'm looking through here and I'm looking to see what kind of texture would work best. Let me tell you which ones don't work. Something with an ombre where it's dark at the bottom and light at the top. That is going to be a little bit harder to turn into a A viable repeating pattern, because you're gonna have to somehow blend these dark and light areas. Whereas something like this, which is more straightforward and all the same color is a lot easier. One of my favorites is this Crim. Usually, I think I love this one a lot and I think I might use that one. So let's just drag that one onto it and then shift click to bring it to the corners to fit it on our, on our Canvas here. Now, in order to make this see-through, I had to choose a blending mode. And so I could go to overlay or soft light. I could try Multiply, Lighten. I just really like this one, the color of it. Let's just go to let's go to overlay, but then I'm going to take the color out of it. So to do that, I'm going to use hue saturation and pull the saturation out of it. Now this layer is right on top of the texture by right-clicking on the hue saturation layer, I can do create clipping mask. And that attaches it to the two, just the texture and not the rest of it. Now I'm not liking this tone very much. So I can move this around and maybe change the color, maybe to a really light green with sort of a whitewash. Okay, so that's looking a little bit more fresh and clean to me. It might be a little bit bright yet, so I might darken this just a hair and pulling this over. Like that. You can play. All right, Now that I've got my whole background sort of set, I need to merge all of this together and I have to make it seamless. So I'm gonna go to the top layer and flatten it. Now at this point, I can't change the color. So if you do want to change the color, let me undo that. We can just turn off the background color so that that can be activated layer later. And I'm going to Shift click and grab all of the things that are currently active and right-click and merge layers. What this is doing is it's merging everything up. That's about the texture in anything extraneous I have going on. And I can work with this and then later at a color underneath it. Because I just I can't I can go ahead and use a blend mode. So if I turn this back on and then change it back to my blend mode screen, Let's see, lighten or overlay. I think I had overlaid or something like that. I can I can return back to where I was before. But I'm not going to use the color again right now. We're going to work on seamless. So how do we do this? Well, grab your layer. We're going to go to Filter Other Offset. Now we have to remember how big our file was, how big was our file or file was 10 thousand pixels. Here, I'm going to do half of that. In this case, 5 thousand pixels, then 5 thousand pixels in the next box, we're going to fill that in and hit Okay. Alright, so now we have created a repeat pattern. That's what the offset filter does. But now we have these lines that we need to deal with. And this is where we have to get a little creative and start to blend and sort of make all of this, this very harsh lines go away. And this is the part where if you had eight an ombre, a pattern or something that's really obvious, it can be very difficult to do. But in this case, what I'm gonna do is just use my Patch Tool. I'm going to start by just grabbing a chunk here and I'm going to start to just move these things around. The more random you do this and the less clinical you are about it, the better. If you're a very clinical about it, you're going to end up with things that look quite manipulated. And just keep in mind that I just made a mistake there. We don't want to be going really close to the edge because we want to get close, but not too close. When we get up here to the very top. I don't want to move a whole lot. Otherwise, we might end up with something that's visible to the naked eye. You want to get, be very careful when you're close to the edge of the square over here. So I basically use the Patch Tool religiously for this. Varying the size of my patches, varying the location of the patching. Obviously this works a lot better if you have a painterly type of fact versus like a pattern that has a very constant repeat that wasn't going to work as well. Now I'm looking to see is there any dark areas, so there's a big dark area here. I can swing that over. I have a feathered patch tool. You can look up here. To see how you have your patch tool set, I have diffusion at five. You can increase that to make it softer even which is really helpful. So here I have a duplicated pattern. I don't want that. So I'm going to go like this. Anything in the middle is totally cool to be however you want it to be, It's just those edges you have to worry about. Then if you want to take off the marching ants, it's Command D or Control D. All right, that's looking fairly good. So we've really masked with the pattern, we've inverted it through using the offset filter. We've changed it. Now we want to preview and make sure that it is a seamless. I'm going to add my color back on here. Do soft light or overlay. Then. Now to preview again, we've used this before, review pattern preview. And we can see if there's anything more that we need to do. There's a little bit right here that's not working. And we see some little line here that's not lining up. So I'm going to add another layer, just a blank layer and grab a brush tool. I'm going to mark it where we're running into the problem. I'm going to zoom in here to kind of see what's going on. We have a dark area and a light area. That's going to repeat down here, a dark and light areas. So basically I just need the inside of this to be a little bit darker. I'm gonna grab my pattern tool. And I'm going to go right up here to the line and move it over and see if that helps. Actually seemed to make it worse. That's looking a little better. All right. I think that got it. So we just keep cloning and patching away until the area that was causing problems is better by using a separate layer with a little x like that. It can help us mark things. In order to do the x, we just have to make sure that we're keeping the marking that we make within the bounds of our box here, that is an actual file. This is a perceived or a pretend file to show us what it looks like. So we know that the problem by marking it over here at marked it on the square and showed us that this was the area that was causing the seamless issue. But now when I zoom out, you can see that yes, there is a little bit of repeat as far as the color goes. But overall it's pretty good and we see a little bit of shadow here so we can continue to play. I'm going to turn off my x, which was showing the problem. And then I can go and just turn off the pattern preview and zoom out here and I can continue working on the texture layer, patching to blend things. And we're not really trying to make it go away. We're just trying to randomize it. So it doesn't feel like it's really distinct. So someone, someone looks at this pattern, are not going to say, Oh, I'm seeing this repeating or that repeating. And when you start to clone a lot, you've got to be careful because you will get repeats. I see little white dots here that are repeating, sometimes dragging things quite a distance. Oops, is that these are repeating their four little dots. Here. There's three little dots. So I can kind of go like this and drag them over. We would just want to make sure that we randomize as much as possible. And that is something that can be a little bit obsessive. And then view Pattern Preview to double-check and make sure that we don't have any lines. We're gonna have repeating shapes just because that's the nature of a pattern. But we don't want any hair lines or anything that looks super obvious that our eye finds offensive. View, Pattern Preview, turn it off. And now I'm happy with my background, but I am going to continue to leave this color there in case I want to change it later. This was our, our little x so we can get rid of that. We don't need that anymore. This is how we make a texture that can be used underneath as a seamless backdrop for our further pattern that we're going to create. All right, thanks, See you in the next video. 34. Tip: Make Small Files Bigger: Now sometimes in order to do the thing that we want to do with our files, we need to have them be smaller. And I like to run a painting programs and some of them really, really slow the computer down and can fill up my RAM. And I have a pretty souped up computer, so it's hard to use massive files. If you are working with smaller files and you want to make them bigger, there are a couple of ways to do that. I have two for you. They're both purchased plug-ins for Photoshop. But they work. And if you're really somebody who prefer to work with smaller files and then enlarged later for whatever uses, usage that you need. It's a great investment. Here in Photoshop, I want to show you the image size. We have image size and it's 3 thousand pixels. That's pretty good. I mean, as far as repeat pattern goes, That's pretty good, but sometimes you need it bigger. If I wanted a duvet cover and I wanted be the painted daily here to be like a foot wide. The way I would have to have a pretty big file to start with. One of the things I can do is go to Filter. And I have something called blow up three, which is from exposure software. They used to be aliens skin software. And I'm just going to compare two different programs for you here. Not a lot of things that you have to dial in here. Basically you want to put in your size. So let's say I want this to be 10 thousand pixels at 240 resolution. Now you can say you want to sharpen the edges or add grain. I don't usually add grain because it's it's usually more of a film or a photo type thing and this is a painterly effect. So the grain, I mean, you can use gray and that can help to mask some of the how it makes it bigger. So you can go play with that if you want. And I just usually leave these at default. Now as far as where you want it to be sharpened for, I sometimes pick none because I don't know where I'm gonna be using it and medium is a good starting point. These are likely going to be put on fabric and they don't have that listed in the drop-down menu, so I just do nothing. Medium. I think that doesn't actually do anything. You have to pick one. We can just we can just pick one inkjet matte paper. I don't think it makes a difference. It probably does make a difference in some degree, but I don't think it's gonna be perceptible as far as it being awful or good. So we don't want to stretch it, so we don't want to click on that and we're not really cropping it, so we don't want to click on that. This is just straight up resizing and then hit Okay. And it's going to run the program and it's blowing up thing. We'll just let it run. But it just this one tends to have like little swoop ease that happen in it. But because this is a painterly program, I'm not really seeing it. This is 131% zooming out to regular screen. It looks pretty good. Let's see where image sizes, if it did it image. Image size 10 thousand pixels. Is it perfect? For printing purposes? Probably I'm seeing a little bit of like Halloween around here, a tiny bit. But with a pattern this busy, it's not really that bad. That's, that's option one. I'm going to open up the painted one again into Photoshop. This is our original. When we zoom in and it pretty much looks the same. But when I zoom in at 253% here, we see some pixelation happening. But when I go over to this one, I can zoom in a lot more because it's 10 thousand pixels, so it does work great. I mean, as far as my opinion goes, another way that you can increase the size of a file that might be too small is by using something called gigapixel. Gigapixel is from Topaz labs. It is a program that is made to increase the file size of your images, to print them or produce them in whatever way you want. Now, gigapixel, as its name implies, means you can make them huge. So I'm going to drop and drag a file in here. This is my smaller painted version. One of them. This, and it's generating a preview which takes a little bit. And I don't know why it has. It starts at the split screen. Okay. I didn't do that before. I just didn't have tanked if I just did an update on this. So you can do single-view and it will show your file. This is a preview. And then you can also look at a side-by-side view, which is why I was a bit confused. Alright, so now what you have to do is pick which amount you want and how you want to do that. So the original, you can see that there are some pixelation lines this is zoomed into. I'm not sure how much they didn't zoom it in Yuma a 100%. Okay, So this is 100% zoom. This is it scaled up four times. You can scale it up six times if you want. This is what it looks like, scaled up on the original six times and this is what it looks like through their program. I don't really need it. That big file was originally, I think about 3 thousand pixels, so going to maybe four times the size is going to be fine. The size now is 11,700 pixels, which is, I go in the ten to 10 thousand to 12 thousand range for some of my bigger products that I want to put this on. Now. One of the things that I can also do is go to this particular pixel amount. So if I want this to be, say, 10 thousand pixels, I can go in and just dial that in. I want it to be 10 thousand pixels and the height I want it to be 10 thousand pixels as well. That's another way you can either use the percentage or you can use the dot dialing in a specific time. There is no face in this and you can do the image type. So is it an unnatural image or a man-made image? Because I did this as a painting type program. I can pick man-made, which gives it a little credit of crispier and you know what, I actually have the wrong violin here. So let me, let me close this. Wait, I don't want to do that. Let me let me close this. Try to close it. No, I don't want to save. I'm looking for my painted one. This is the one that I wanted to do. The painted screaming yellow and orange. So let's bring that in. And if I right-click, it might have gigapixel here. Shows you that it gives you a splash screen with some information and all of that. This is a little better. Okay, So the originalist 3 thousand pixels, the one that I'm doing now remembered the settings I dialed in the last time, which was 10 thousand pixels. I don't have a face and it is man-made. I could try natural to see what it looks like. Natural being like a photograph, man-made, being like graphic design image. So this isn't quite as sharp as the man-made version. So maybe I'll stick with man-made. You can suppress noise. You can put it in the auto detect settings, which is gonna look for things like JPEG artifacts or anything that could just be unpleasant. You can see how much better this is when I scale up the original versus the one that they're doing for the gigapixel. It looks great. Let's see here. I can check different areas to see how it differs. It just looks a lot better. I can remove blur or suppress noise. Then I just have to hit Okay, and hit Save. We'll process the file. So I like this one. It's a little expensive and I got it as a kit bundle with a bunch of Topaz labs, AI enhanced programs. If I go over here to my files here I have gigapixel, AI, Topaz, denoise, and the mask. We just let it process and then it'll just give me the option to decide where I want to save it. And it does take awhile and I can hear the fan starting to run up on my computer. But where this comes in super handy is when you have a small file, Let's say you're working on an iPad and you have a program that you're working in like a symmetry program or maybe one like Procreate or something like that. And you didn't make the original file that big. Let's say you want that picture just like you did it, but you want it on a duvet and you need to amplify this iss. You're gonna have to figure out a way to either blow it up in a program like this or the exposure blow up, or you're going to have to scale that seamless pattern across the surface which can result in smaller file pattern. Let me let me show you what I mean. I was working on some some patterns that were taken from the iPad. I created them on the iPad and they're more digital designs and I was trying to scale up the products. So here's the original file. You can take a peek here. And this is just like a seventies kinda colored muted purple repeat pattern. Now, I blew it up and blow up to 10 thousand pixels so that I could use this on a duvet at scale. But when I wanted to originally repeat the pattern, just by repeating the pattern, it looked like this, which is good. I mean, maybe I want it like this and that's fine. But if I wanted to keep it at scale and have it be big, I would need to blow it up. Now this is what it did with my original. For a duvet cover, it was just far too small and I could see the grid that was happening. There. You can see there, you can see a grid pattern. There isn't technically a grid pattern. I could have thrown in a few more elements to make that not the case, but pretty much any pattern that you zoom out this far, you're gonna start to see a grid, uh, just because of the nature of the beast. But you'd like you don't see that kind of grid pattern on this one. It's just because we're zoomed out so far. This is a problem. I didn't want this to be this way. And I think this is a 10 thousand pixel one. I went in and I use blow up to get 10 thousand pixels looking like that. And then I use the pattern to re-size. They use that larger one to fit in another. I started a new one from scratch and then define the pattern and put this in at this scale. You just have options. There are options that you can do. It's still processing. You can look at, it's at 90% down here. So it does take awhile. You won't want to be doing this with batch processing of a lot of images. But if you need one that's to be particularly big for whatever purpose, you can go ahead and use this program. All right, so it finished running and it just closed out on its own and I thought that it had crashed. But what it did was it went in and changed the exact file size of my file here, and did the gigapixel deal and made it 10 thousand pixels. Now when I do the info panel here by getting info, which is a right-click on a Mac. You can see that is now 10 thousand pixels, so it overwrote, it wrote over the top my original file. So you're going to want to make a duplicate of your file first. And I forgot about that because it's been awhile since I use this particular one, I use blowup more often. But this one does a remarkable job. Just make sure that you can duplicate your file before you drag it into the program. And when we open it and take a peek at it in preview here, we're just going to zoom in and see how it looks. That looks amazing. That looks so good. I mean, it's just going to print really well, both on paper and on fabric. There you go. Blowing up your images. Thanks everyone. 35. Patching and Cloning a Painted Pattern Swatch: Sometimes I like to finish an image in painting program as you've probably already guessed. And I wanted to show you the image that I was translating. So here's a PNG of the original file and it's nice and crisp. The elements in this pattern were created In photographed and then an edited in Lightroom and Photoshop and then taken into Eichler Rama. And the bird here was cut out and edited in Photoshop with the oil paint filter. But it feels a little disjointed to me. Maybe it's because the bird is oil paint and the rest is I call Rama, I don't know, but it just doesn't feel like it's cohesive. I like to take things into different painting programs and try to unify all the elements. And that's a key thing here. You don't want it to feel disjointed, like it was hobbled together. You want to have it feel cohesive, like it was all meant to be. In pattern design. Things shouldn't jump out at you as being odd or the whole thing as a whole should feel natural. So let it was meant to go together. So this is a version that I put through Topaz impression. And it just gives the same kind of processing effect to all of the picture. And so it feels like it's a little bit more pulled together. I still might work on the color palette a little bit, but I wanted to fix the edges because when you go into a painting program, the edges may not match up anymore. This is already been created through making a swatch with a square using the offset filter and then adding other elements to fill in the gaps as we've done before. But I wanted to see how bad the edges are. They're pretty bad. We have lines that are meeting up here and these aren't the lines that we get an Illustrator. These are just painting marks that aren't filled in. And the nice thing about it is it's generally the same color on either side of the line, so we can describe our color and paint away and we don't have to be changing colors every 30 seconds. So what I'm gonna do to make this easier is to do another offset of this. We need to copy the layer Command J or pull it down to the plus sign filter other offset. And this image, oops, I always forget to check the image size. The image size on this one is 4 thousand pixels. I'm not really sure why this particular pattern ended up not being a true square. I have no idea where in the process we lost pixels. But I know it has to be about 2 thousand pixels for the offset filter. Other offset. And I'm going to grab 2 thousand pixels. And this one is 2 thousand pixels as well. The offset will make sense of the pixels that are not quite uniform square. But you can see here that what it's done is it's moved the lines to the middle of our blue box so that the edges up here are perfectly seamless. So now I can edit within the size of this bounding box and have it be easier to see and easier to clone and easier to paint and all of that view Pattern Preview, take that off. Alright, so we're gonna start at the top here and just kind of make sense of the mass. Now, the thing that you have to be careful with with painting that's different than using something that you've done as a vector and then brought as a PNG or PDF or what have you is the fact that we have these strokes. So how do we paint over this without it looking funny? Well, we could use a brush that is a paintbrush That's similar. So we can have brushstrokes that are kind of going over the lines. We could also try using the patch tool, which I think might be a better choice. I'm going to select this and pull it over. And as you see, it just does away with any of the issue that we were having. And it does it in a way that isn't drawing massive attention to itself. It's retaining some of the strokes and the lines that are part of the painting process of the program. Without it being too weird. Now here we have a little bit of a problem that it was, you know, how the Patch Tool and I don't know if you're aware of this, but the patch tool can pull pixels and soften pixels and make it look like a blur. Here you can see we're almost at the pixel level because you see the pixels. That is because of the diffusion factor. So we can bring our diffusion down. Then give it a go again and it tries to keep those edges. This isn't terrible, but I can flip fix it up more by going into my clone tool. Grabbing a circle, let me see. There we go. I wasn't sure where my circle was. If it was bigger, if it was little. I grabbed my option tool or Option key. And I can kind of go over the top to satisfy myself that that's not as wispy and kind of fuzzy looking as it was before. Then I can go back to my Patch Tool and continue on. Within the confines of a shape, the Patch Tool works great. I do try to get areas like this that are that are similar but kind of dissimilar. I tried to do the patch tool within that area alone versus overlapping because we get those fuzzy pixels. Again. This particular issue, I find that the cloning and Patch Tool works better. So now I have those fuzzy pixels that, oops, what did I do? Cancel. I hit the wrong command D. Which case? I'm back to the patch tool. I can just kind of patch over anything that looks a mess. I'm not sure what I did there. Go back to the patch tool. There we go. Remember we're working at the pixel level. So really nobody's going to see this, but it makes me feel better. This one's going to be crazy because we have, we have such a distinct barrier between these two. This is again going to be better with the clone tool, anything that the patch tool doesn't take care of the clone tool. Well, I might just clone over this line with this color, and I might just go over this as well. When we zoom back out. I mean, they're really just splotchy paint paint strokes. There's really nothing keeping me from just filling this end or using my Patch Tool and just saying, I don't really need this area to be white. I can grab pixels from over here. This is just some random brushstroke things, but again, ended up with a mess there with the Patch Tool. So back to the clone tool. Incidentally, I have the selection made from the Patch Tool. I can go ahead and hit the Option key. And this is just going to clone within the confines of this space to keep it from merging into the edges are overlapping or anything. You can do that as well. Here this, this is probably a better clone option. Make my brush a little smaller. Just clone over these areas that are looking at this. This is so much faster than using the paint option, which is better when you're working with the more pixelated, not pixelated, but the more vector style. This just works a lot better. I can use the patch tool. That other tool you can try is the spot healing tool. I couldn't remember what it was called. Spot Healing. And this often does a great job if you have a very distinct line color on the boat on both sides, it doesn't need to be amended. Does a great job. Okay, so now we're coming into the conjunction here. Which to-do while clone. I think it was gonna be better. If you have a weird brushstrokes that are just problematic. I often find the clone tool to be the winner. I just keep Option clicking outside of the area that I'm trying to clone. Oops, I zoomed way back. You can see how far out we were. Looks good. This is where everything converges. Can be a bit of a problem, but not for the clone tool. Now I'm getting kind of a buds here. And I think it would be better to extend this color out. Randomize it. Anyway. So I'm not going to bore you with the rest of this, but this is the basic way of going about it. Cloning and using the Patch Tool. Randomizing where you're picking from and then just continue on your merry way. And that will help make it be the perfectly seamless painted pattern. And then you can continue on. Working with desaturating are enhancing or playing with contrasts. But once that's all done, it is good to go. 36. Tip: Use the Move tool for Tweaking: One quick tip I wanted to throw in here is how you can use the Move tool if you want to slightly rearrange things and you don't always be, you aren't always willing to transform and move. So when you have layers here and you see that I have an art piece that I am working on. And I just have a few layers open here. And when I click them on and off, you can see the little pieces that I added. This was after I made an offset repeat and there were some blank spaces, so I started to put in extra pieces. Now, one of the things that I normally do is select the layer and then Control T to transform. And then I can move it around. I can shift and make it bigger. But sometimes it can get a little bit touchy and I can end up turning things when I don't want to or I can end up resizing When I don't want to. So we don't always have to use the transform tool. If I just click out of this and nothing is activated, if I go to the Move tool, which looks like a little cross with arrows going in every direction and activate that, I can start to move this around. And it keeps the scale of the item, it keeps the direction of the item. If I just want to slightly move it over, I can do that. In this case, it's fine where I had it before, but I don't have to necessarily go in and pick the layer and hit Transform. It's just a faster way of keeping the item in its constrained size and position overall. And then I can just kind of drag it and tweak it than other pieces right here. So if I'm not, I'm not I don't have anything activated. I can go ahead and move this around and shift it slightly. That's something that you can do without having to do as many clicks. It isn't something that I use a lot personally. But if you're at the point where you have maybe a 100 layers, you've got a lot of layers and it's hard to remember which layer is activated. The move tool can just let you jump in there. And if it's a layer, you can start to move it around without having to activate it first. The only reason I had to click to click it on and off was just so I knew what to grab because not every item on this page is currently in a layer. Some of them have been flattened. I had to just click it to find where these three layers were located. But if all of them are active, then I can move literally everything and start to shift it around. I just wanted to throw that out there in case that works with your editing style a little better. 37. What to do when elements go missing in Pattern Preview: In this video, I wanted to talk about an issue that can happen when you start to put elements using the pattern preview. When you use the pattern preview it, there's a little idiosyncrasy that I want to address that can happen that I'm sure you might run into. And so we're just going to recreate it here. These are the elements that I've been using to make this pretty pattern. And I'm just gonna go ahead and make a new one so that we can add some of these elements in. For size purposes, I'm just going to grab a small one so you can fill up the size quickly with a transparent background. Alright, now in my folder here I have some of these elements that I pre-processed by cutting out in Photoshop and using AI Colorado to add the effect. And we're going to use Pattern Preview to place these. I want to show you an issue that can happen. When we go ahead and use pattern preview. It leaves the square in the middle. And that means that we can drag our elements into this square and it'll over the edge of the square to create seamless patterns. Now when I grab this and drag it in, as long as it's within the frame here. If I hit Enter, when I turn off Pattern Preview, it remains within the square. However, when I start to add other elements that cross the barrier, let's just put one in here that's going to cross over like that. If I just turn off pattern preview, right now, this one stays. Now, if I continue on, what you might end up finding is that some of the pieces stay within the frame when you turn off Pattern Preview and some may disappear. So if I go in here and I'm just going to drag and put in a couple of more. We're just gonna make a really bold big pattern here. Just so that you can see what I'm talking about. I'm going to add one of these again. I tend to like to put Open Face flowers on the top of, let's just make this really big and cover both of these stems. Kind of crossover, both as I go through and check and I turn off Pattern Preview. Let me turn it back on. Do you notice how this one disappeared? So look at this flower here that crosses over, and it's a repeat of this trio of flowers over here. But when I turn off Pattern Preview, there's nothing here. What's happening is you have things that are crossing over on multiple places. Right here it's crossing over and right here it's crossing over. These two items are, and especially this one is missing from our pattern. One of the things I found is that you're going to have to group or merge everything in order for Pattern Preview to continue to work. Anything that's within the pattern itself is going to stay. But if something's lag over or drag over, it might disappear from your pattern preview so you can export this. It's missing something. So how do we fix this? Well, going back to Pattern Preview, it'll return and go back into its position here. And now we see that the patterns there. But what do we do with that? Well, there are a couple of different things and I've tried different ways. So I'm gonna show you a couple of different ways that I've tried that perhaps are integrated in other people's workflow that sometimes work in, sometimes don't. So the first one that I wanted to try was a Smart Object Group. So if you go ahead and click on the first one and the last one like that, and right-click on it. You can do Convert to Smart Object. And it makes it all in one group that is a smart object. What this means is when I double-click on this, it will open it up the grouping in another window over here. And I can move around and edit. And then when I hit Save, it'll come back and save it and replace it over. Here. The trouble is, oops, what happened there? It's like missing part of the stem. That's another issue. When I made this smart object, we lost something here, so let's undo it. When I, when I made it SMR object, it disappeared. Part of, it made part of the stem disappear. So let's do that again. If I convert to smart object, it gets weird. Pattern preview doesn't always play nicely with some of the things that may work in other scenarios. That can be a problem, that can be frustrating. In order for this to work, that isn't going to be an option. So using a smart object as a group isn't going to work now each of these aren't individuals more objects because that's what happens when you drag them in. But that's another video. Anyway. So what I tend to do is select them all. Then I have to emerge the visible or merge layers. In this case, merged layers just means anything that is checked with the eyeball and it has active, you will merge. The trouble is, is this isn't editable anymore. You can't go in and shift and change anything. If I decide this is too close right here, I want to move this I can't, I'm locked in. However, when I go to View pattern preview, it's also locked in here. What I suggest is working in layers as long as possible and tweaking it and getting it to exactly where you like. And then saving a PSD out that has all of your layers in it. And then Smith's undo this. Now we're back to our layers. Now I can tweak and I can save this whole thing as a PSD. Let's say I wanted to tweak this little one. I don't like where it's at, so I just find it. I can also use the Move tool. But in this case I want to transform it because I wanted tweak it just a little bit and bring it up. Transform works better. Now I can, I can save this as a PSD. So let's do File, Save a Copy. I'm going to just save this as a Photoshop file. And I'm gonna leave the name on title just so I have it. Then we can open it up if I can find out where it is. So you can see that all the elements are there. If I open with Photoshop, it opens another version and we have our layers intact. Now when I go to View pattern preview and take it off, we're missing our pieces again, but at least we have the whole thing saved as a PSD so that I can find it later and tweak it, but it's not locked in. Going back to our other item that we started with the very first nerve. Whereas it, whereas our first one, There's our first one, merging them together. By selecting all shift, clicking, selecting them all and merging the layers is the only way that view pattern preview is going to work in, lock everything in. So I just wanted you to know about that little idiosyncrasy because sometimes you're working on a pattern and then you go to just check it without the Pattern Preview on and pieces disappear. That is why to recap, you either need to merge them all together or in order to keep working and see it both ways with and without pattern preview. Or you need to save it as a PSD just to safe keep it for editing later and tweaking later. It's better to work on it until it's complete and then merge the layers as a final step before you export it out. But as long as you have your PSD file that's saved, then you have a backup that you can go ahead and keep editing and it puts you back to the step where yes, Pattern Preview won't show all the pieces when you turn it off. But you can continue editing if you need to go back and redo something. That's just a little idiosyncrasy of pattern preview that you may run into. It doesn't happen if you work within the confines of the square. It's only when you start having things that bridge over the edge that some things stay connected and some things don't. And it can be really frustrating if you're like, where did everything go? So I hope that helps. Thanks everyone. 38. Filling a Space with Pattern Using the Paint Bucket Tool: There are times when you want to add your pattern to a predefined shape or size and scale the pattern so that it fits according to your wishes. Now one of the things that I've noticed throughout all of this is that you can use a pattern that you've created in a large size. This one is 3 thousand pixels, so this one's not very big. I could always use something like blow up or the gigapixel from Topaz. In order to make it say 15 thousand pixels, maybe I wanted to scale it up quite a bit. And so I wanted to keep the exact look that it has here on something big like say a duvet cover. There are other times when I want the pattern to be more subtle. And how do you do that? How do you make it so that it's not so giant all over the surface. Well, let's start by making a new file. I'm going to go with 12 thousand at 150 PBI with transparent background, which is what I personally use for a lot of print on demand places that need 150 DPI or PPI, sorry, and I'm pretty big file. Now, I have to decide how big do I want the pattern to be on here. One thing I should mention is that once I put the pattern on here, it may not be continuously repeatable. In other words, once I put it on here, I won't necessarily be able to go to View pattern preview and extend that pattern out more and more. It is what it is. This is me filling this space with the pattern to be used on a product and I'm not going to be scaling or changing it. At least I'm not going to be making it bigger or duplicating it. On some places you can shift things around a little bit, but this is what it is. It's a static product that's not going to change. Alright, so let's put the pattern on here. Well, the first thing I need to do is define my pattern. So I'm going to go to edit, define pattern and put this into the mix. So now it's saved and then define pattern area. Go back to my file. Normally what I would do would be the usual that you've seen before, which is Shift F5 or Edit Fill. And that is where I go in and I can grab the pattern and I can, oops, I use this, I use a script, so I need to turn that off, cancel to F5, turn the script off and hit Okay. This fills the size that we have perfectly. And in this case it might be it might be repeatable and it is, and the reason it's repeatable as I started with a square that was 3 thousand pixels, and I failed a square that was 12 thousand pixels, which is a multiple of it. Three times four is 12. So 3 thousand times 4 thousand is 12 thousand. And it works just fine. It worked just perfectly. That's not always gonna be the case. If you have a 3 thousand pixel and you go to a 15, or that still would work. Let's go 14. So if you had 3 thousand pixels, a little pattern and you wanted to put it into a 14 thousand pixel pattern. It may not fit perfectly. In this case it does, so we got lucky there. But maybe I wanted it smaller or bigger. It's maybe I want these flowers to be bigger on the pattern or smaller. Maybe I want it to be more like a ditsy pattern with little tiny icons are elements. Let's undo that. I can show you the other way, which is with the paint bucket tool. So we want to go find our paint bucket tool. I sometimes have to click on the three dots here to find it because it's not always active. If you click on the three dots, it will open up the window here where you can choose the tool that isn't right there. And I don't have paint, the paint bucket tool on by default, so I'll have to go in and adjust that later. But this is the key to helping us fill the pattern with the scale that we want. Now that paint bucket is, is selected, I'm going to go up to layer, new fill layer. That's the key layer, new fill layer. And I'm going to choose pattern. Now when I hit OK, it's going to fill it with a default pattern that's ugly. Namely these leaves. But I can go down to the dropdown menu and scroll down to my pattern. And there it is. Now before I click okay, I have the opportunity to scale it. And I can go to, this is 100%. If I go all the way down to one, it'll take a second to render and you'll see this teeny, teeny, teeny tiny pattern. One of the things is there is a bit of a lag, so you may be thinking like it's not working, but there it is, It's just super tiny, almost not discernible. Then I can scale it up to 45. Maybe I wanted it 12. But you can go through and scale it to the size you want, or maybe I want it bigger than normal. Maybe I want a really huge trouble is here. You can't, you can move it around and get it to where you want it to be. That's not really a trouble, I guess you just have to remember to do it here before you hit. Okay. Because if you don't hit Okay, then it's are you if you do hit Okay, then you're just kind of done. I can choose how I want it and then I can hit. Okay. And now it's felt now this again because we went ahead and used a multiple, it may still work with pattern preview. But I see here, let's go up to the corner. It's not. So do you see how there is a line right here that shows how the scaling and moving around negates the opportunity to have it as continuously be seamless. In the case of using Edit Pattern fill, worked fine, but using the paint bucket with the layer layer new fill layer pattern, it does not work with that. So I just wanted to alert you to that. But this also makes it helpful if you just know that for the product that you're making, you want it to be this big and you want it to fit it just perfectly. You can take the specs from whatever product you're making and then fill your pattern. So that is how you use the paint bucket tool and the Layer New Fill Layer Pattern workflow in order to fill a space that you've predefined. 39. Tip: Tricky Selections: Sometimes making selections can be super tricky, especially if your subject is really close in color to your background. This hydrangea, it initially made more sense to me to shoot it on a black or dark background, but that didn't work out very well. And that's because petals tend to be transparent. And so whatever color you have behind your subject make show through the paddles. And so early on this summer I learned that using backgrounds that actually are close to the subject itself work a little bit better, or at least that they're very light-colored because at anything that comes through doesn't seem tomorrow or change the light pattern and it's cleaner look when I use a lighter color. And also photoshop seems to recognize lighter backgrounds easier sometimes the darker backgrounds, and it doesn't really matter the color of the darker background. I could use wood color or a black piece of foam core or dark gray. It doesn't matter whatever it was. If it was darker, it just didn't work as well. Your mileage may vary. The algorithm or whatever they do under the hood may change. But for now, I tend to stick to a white background. So anyway, when I went to go make my selection, I did a variety of things. I started with my usual Select Subject to see how it did. And this is what it did. It did not did not select very much except the leaves. I went through with the first selection tool there. And while it worked, okay. Eventually it started to snap and grab the whole thing which wasn't working. So I started over. I thought, well maybe I'll use object aware. Let's try that. One. Same thing just was not working. And I cancelled out of that and I decided to try color range just because this one didn't work either because even with the lowest, lowest fuzziness, the most thing selected, it still wasn't selecting all of the flower petals and that wasn't working either. One of the things I decided to do was go in and add a curves adjustment. I'm going to add curves and I'm gonna make it darker like this. Then I'm going to go back to my layers. And I want to do my selection now. Select, Select and Mask. Select subject. Then I noticed it wasn't working, so I have to have the curves attached to the layer in order for this to work. So what I'm going to do is make a clipping mask and that attaches this adjustment to the background layer. Let's try it again. Select, Select and Mask. That worked a whole lot better. I just had to go in here and touch up a couple of petals that didn't get selected. I decided in my head, I'm just going to leave the white background that's showing through right here. I could go in with this tool, the second brush and try to catch that. But it wasn't really working that great. That's an option, but I decided to just leave it be because it wasn't really working very well for me. Hit, Okay, now, Here's the thing. The selection is on, the mask here. We want it to be on the whole thing. So what it's basically done is masked off the curves adjustment because it was on that layer. But it showed me, hey, this works and this selection is working. I thought, well there's a bunch of things I could do. Let me go out that off. So I decided to just undo that like that. And then I was going to flatten it. Now go Select, select and mask because I knew it worked. Now, let it do its thing. But I was kind of a test to see if if it would even make a difference if the curves adjustment will make a difference in him hit. Okay. Now I can go ahead and do my regular thing which is Layer via Copy. Now on this layer, I can just do Command M and I can redo what I ended before. Whatever I did before. I'm going to undo it. In this case, I'm going to brighten it up a lot and put it back to the way it was originally. Now I have a selection that's pretty good. There are some things that could still be adjusted. But overall, it works. If you want to see how well it works, you can add a blank layer, add a solid color, preferably black, or some dark color. And then you can see how well it worked. In this case, I'm not liking how it looks here. So I'm gonna go up to my layer. I'm gonna take my clone stamp tool, make it kind of big. Grab this flower and move it over the top. That wasn't a 100%. I don't think. It seems kind of light. Everything's a 100%. Let's, let's just do it not so soft. Let's do a little harder brush. I'm gonna grab this flower here. Put it on top. There. I've covered it up. It works fine. So that's the way around it, darkening it first, then lightening it after the fact is, is a way that can help with some of these tricky subjects on tricky backgrounds. 40. Print on Demand: Uploading to Redbubble: Print-on-demand is a huge bucket of interests for pattern makers. And it's a mixed bag. There's really good things. There's not so great things. And so I just wanted to do a little overview of what I've learned in the market of print on demand. There are several types of print on demand. There are print on-demand places that are simply places. You can have some stuff printed and you can buy it wholesale and then sell it via your home or either either drop shipping options where you can set up a store and then you can have the company that prints the product and send it out to the people. There are print on-demand marketplaces that do both. Redbubble is one of the more common ones. And they let you upload your designs onto multiple products. And then you can market your site or direct people to your marketplace on their site. I have a marketplace on here. You can view the shop that I have. You can go to your account. Do you make an account? It's free. Then you can set up your store. Now, I've been experimenting with different things. The videos, there are tons of videos on YouTube about Red bubble. I find 99% of them are not true, at least in my experience. As with everything it evolves. Everything evolves. There are ebbs and flows, right bubble has been around awhile. So things that may have worked for somebody three years ago may not work now for promoting. And it really depends on if this marketplace it's perfect for what you're selling. A lot of the videos that are on YouTube directing people to how to use Redbubble are often talking about trending things like T-shirts I had to do with current current hot topics like politics or something like that. And so it's different than like an evergreen green product like I tend to make. And so I'm kind of moving away from this Redbubble type format. I've tried many. And one of the big problems I find with something like Redbubble is you have a marketplace, but then if you want to go and promote that marketplace, you end up sending people to potentially your store, but also everybody else's. So if I send somebody to the store, they might scroll down and click on something that I've made. And then if they click on an item, say the stress that has Harlow car roses on it. And then they might see other things that I sell. But then they have similar designers from 700 thousand independent artists. And these all are actually many of mine, but then they also have other people's things thrown in there as well. So really you're kind of advertising for Redbubble versus advertising for yourself. So because of that, a lot of people who do pattern design will start their own stores through places like Shopify or e-commerce. There's a lot of things. Big, Big Cartel, Shopify, Woo Commerce goes with WordPress. Squarespace is another one, but that's a whole other bag. You have to mix your pattern designing with the creation of the products, which we're going to talk about in this video and then get them into the store and then market your store. So it's like it's a very long, big process, but I wanted to walk you through some of the steps of uploading to a simple site like Redbubble. See you could get started right away and then kind of jumped down the rabbit hole. After that, I'm going to go into my Redbubble account and I'm gonna go down to the big red button that says Add new work. There's a couple of different ways that you can add work. You can upload new work where you wanted to put in every parameter yourself. Or you can copy an existing work which is based on parameters that you've already locked in. And this makes more sense when you have multiple types of products. For instance, you might have one product that you use for stickers only or maybe stationary, and then you have something else that you'd want to tile seamlessly for things like a dress or a bag or something like that. So whatever works for you, but we're going to start out with a new one so that I can show you how to do that. You just click on it at new work. And then in previous video, I worked on this leaf horizontal stripe. I'm going to upload that. Now. What you're going to want to do is let it upload. And I have the 7 thousand by 7 thousand pixels. I'm going to have to tie all this and work with each individual product to decide how I want it to look on it. I think it will be time-consuming because it's a seamless design. It will have to be tiled and it also can go on a lot of products, but you'll have to check to see how they look. So we're gonna walk through that whole process together. The first thing I want to do is just write my title. This is a sage leaf stripe design and then tags. You'll want to tag yourself, your name. You want to tag your shop name. That it's that's in there as well in case somebody puts in my name in the search bar, Carolina Jensen, It shows up. I could have a space or not, and then I can put the color green, tone on tone. Dash out. My microphone always gets in the way as I'm typing. Leaves. Subtle. You can put up to 50 keywords in here. I can do each individual thing, fern, rose, leaf, sometimes long tail keywords help too. Feminine, shabby, chic. Like that. You can put longer keywords which might if someone says I want a feminine, shabby chic design, it might be more likely to come up. There is a dahlia leaf. Leaves, rose leaf. I can just do leaves alone. You can go through and do all of that and then you can put in a description. So I usually just copy the title here. And then you can stuff it with as many keywords as you can in the description, sage leaf stripe design. With monochromatic, pale green leaves. You can go on and on and on and fill that in and I won't bore you with that, but I tried to put some thought into this. You want as many things that would drive people to this particular design as possible. It is very much like Google and keywords. Keywords is everything because that's how people are going to find it. The one thing you read bubble does, right? Is they really do rely on their great traffic. They have tons of traffic. But the truth is, is that you'd have to get the right people to your, to your area. And a lot of times you have to think about the demographic of Redbubble as well. Who are their main customers? Are the other main customers in the 20 to 30 year old range. And I think they are there. They tend to be younger or stickers. I know a really big on Redbubble. So it depends on your product is jiving with their particular demographic that they're reaching. And so it all plays in, but I'm not going to spend more time on that. For this one. It isn't the best. For t-shirts. Some people only do t-shirts where they fill in the front of it. And then so that you can go in and you can move your design around, you can change the color. But because this one is a seamless tiling design, it isn't the best for t-shirts, but I do lose out on a lot of potential products. I had been historically putting them on t-shirts as well, but I don't know if anybody's actually going to buy a seamless tile on a t-shirt. So I'm just disabling it right there. Same with the hat here. It's not really something I think anybody would, would gravitate to. But you can, if it fits with your product. Great. So I'm going to disable that. Now. The, the ones that I tend to do with seamless tiling are the clothes and things that the tile. Well, if we want to tile something, There's two different ways that you can tile it. You can click on it and then choose your pattern. And provided that your tile is very seamless, you can hit regular, regular grid and then you can scale it down or up. And then move it around to have it fit, how you want it to fit on your design. I like that on these graphic tees, I like them to be a little bit bigger, kind of off center. But some of them have a little grid or cross in the middle. If you do go ahead and tile it, you can line things up. Well, for instance, I wanted, if I wanted this really tiled small and I wanted to write lined up in the middle. I can use this little cross to gauge that. I probably won't do that with this one. Since this is the graphic design and I want it to be kind of kind of off center like that. This one I might leave as it is. But anyway, you go through each one and you have to decide what you want to do with it. Don't leave anything untouched. Because if you do, you're likely going to end up with something that's a mess and you're gonna have to go back in and fix it. I also recommend that you order at least a couple of the things that you're trying to see, how they look, how they fit. Do you like the quality? Is it something that you would like to sell personally? There are mixed reviews on the products here from Redbubble. I'm going to leave the stickers and magnets. I'm gonna leave the cell phone, I think more or less alone. But one thing I should mention about this. Is when you set a design, it isn't necessarily just setting that one design. Phones, cases and skins. It's going to do all the phones. They do Samsung and Google Pixel and all the phones. When you set the design, it's when you finally finish and upload all of this. It's going to put this design on all of the phones, not just the one that you're seeing here. This is just a representative one. Look to see how many products like stickers and magnets. There's four enabled for different things are happening there. And you can't Some of them we can't change. So this is a sticker. They don't have a tiling option here. If you want to do something that's related to this design, you can just replace the design altogether for something like stickers and magnets. Some people do that. I've done that too, where I might have a floral design and I'll just have the floral motif with a transparent background and I'll upload that as a sticker so it's different than the tile. But anyway, you want to look at the quality of the products, which ones you like. And what you see is what you get. So this is a stripes. If I go small with it, you can see the stripes really well. I don't necessarily want that. For something like this. You don't have to do all the products either. That's something else to keep in mind. The year is not required that you do all the products and people only do t-shirts are only do wall art or only do pillows. But anyway, you can go through, and I suggest that you click on every single one and see if it looks like you want it to look. I don't usually do prints, cards and posters with the tile alone, laptop sleeves. I wanted to tie all that. If you have just a singular object, say a flower that's on a transparent background. You can tile it with a half drop, which is, which is also called offset grid. But that doesn't work well with a seamless tile like this. I always choose the regular grid. Now this is an important one. What you use for a shower curtain, maybe different than what you're gonna use for debate, but it's the same upload because there's three products here. Do Bayes, comforters and shower curtains are all going to be using whatever you upload here. I tend to keep them small and subtle because that's what I would want to do. Bay, You might be different. You might want something really loud and big and that's totally fine. It's just you got to make sure that you're covering you want and you don't have any any customization as far as I want this on undo Bay and that on a shower curtain. It's a once upload things so you're just kinda stuck. This is where things can get weird. So like the mug looks fine, but when I hit Edit, It's actually is covering it a lot of times it doesn't. I'm gonna go in here and cover my mug. I thought it was going to have white. It looked it looked like there was white right there. And sometimes there is. And if you don't, if you're not careful, you can upload everything and then later on you'll get an advertisement for your own work. And you'll realize that it's not covering everything. This one's fine. Mini skirts. I usually do a small pattern on a mini skirt, but we're just gonna go big and bold with it there. And hit Enable scarf. Always double-check the scarf because sometimes there's a white line on the side if your file size isn't quite big enough. In this case, I'm fine. Tablets and skins, drawstring bags, notebooks. This is a pretty mild patterns, so it looks good on everything, but here it's not lit up. And that means that for throw blankets and tapestries, it's not fitting. It doesn't always tell you this though, so you have to double-check all of them. Art boards and prints. I'm gonna take those off because this one doesn't really work for that regular. And then scale it down a bit. Throw blanket like that. And then hit Enable math. Matt. Maybe I'll just leave it like that water bottle makes sure that it's filled in. I don't normally do but Canvas and mounted prints, but with this kind of zoomed in like this, It's not showing the whole tile. It is. I can zoom it in. Maybe. This isn't really something I would print per se, but I like to differentiate it. So it's not just the seamless tile by going to regular pattern and then kind of shifting it around. I'm not having the true repeat pattern because it's also a rectangle and not a square. And so that looks a little bit better. Cotton tote bag, pin, mask, apron, like the jigsaw puzzle doesn't work unless I do a grid. I don't think this would be something I'd really do want a jigsaw puzzle, so I'm gonna keep it disabled, but that's how you do it. This leave. Trust us, leave this top. Regular. Maybe like that. Keep a big bold pattern, floor pillow, and then phone wallets, leggings. This one can be kind of funky to you gotta be careful with this one. Sometimes this tone on tone one is actually awesome for leggings because it's not so crazy. Some people love crazy leggings on. Those people would love it if there was some more color. Socks. One thing about socks is it is one file. Unless you do custom, custom design for Sachs alone, it's kind of hard to get them to look the same backpack, regular grid, and then just move it around until it looks good to you. You can keep an eye on the mockup there as well. I don't know, just continue playing. Now, this one doesn't fit because there's whitespace. So again, irregular grid. See what looks good to you. It's all going to depend on your pattern and what looks good with your pattern. They did mask. Now I'm doing a lot of the products, but again, I want to reiterate, some people only do just one or two of these. You don't have to know. This is kind of photography and design and illustration both. So I can click on those. And then I don't have a collection to put this one into. I do have actually had one Loving leaves is one that I have a collection of just leaves and that's what this is. We'll put it in there. It's not mature content. I leave it optimized for what Redbubble will show to people. And then I have the rights to sell this. And anybody can see it. I'm going to jump up here and I'll just leave this as it is, but you could go on and put more keywords in and more titling. I can edit that later and then save work. Now it's going to upload it. And so that is how you go ahead and upload here. Now, this company Redbubble is by far, what you've seen here is the easiest way to upload work. Because other print on demand places would require you to tile out your work according to the size of the product that you're using. Here's another way that you can sell and this is printed phi. There's other one's called first one that's very similar called print full. And there are lots of different places, but this requires me to plug this into a store that I'm paying membership for in order to sell these products. So print defy, unlike read Bible is not a marketplace. I can't just make products and then sell on a marketplace from that company. I would have to tuck it into my own store, link it up. But let's just find their their products. So I have a store here of what I was I was working on just some test products. I don't have a store to connect this a width, but I was just playing and I just wanted to show you, Let's edit this listing. I was working on an all overprint dress. And let me see edit this design. Let's look at it a little bit bigger with accompany like this. Not only do you have to put the pattern on one part of it, but you have to do like the backside and the left sleeve and the right slave, the color. And I haven't added the color here. Let's see. I made it white. Yes, I did. Okay. So nevermind. Forgive me there. It was getting confused. I have a white and our color. Maybe I'll change this color to something else. Now I remember why I did it white because I didn't have the exact Xcode, so we'll just leave it. Anyway. This is the design. I would have to then save this product, upload it to a place that I'm doing, print on-demand and do all of that. And so it does require a little bit more effort with each individual product. Now if you're only selling all overprint t-shirts or you're only printing all overprint tunic tops like this, which I think are kind of cool and I might actually do that because I love a good, great tunic top. They say this is address to me, it's more like a long t-shirt in my world. But anyway, I could put a custom color in here that matches the back of the dress. Regardless of all that, this is another way that you can upload your products. It just as more of a 11 at a time type thing. I wanted to just give you an overview of that and that you can be inspired to hopefully go try it yourself.