Backgrounds - Halftones, Sunburst, Patterns in Adobe Photoshop - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Create Project Backgrounds in Adobe Photoshop Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design for lunch class creating backgrounds in Adobe Photoshop including half-tones, sunburst and patterns. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're creating background in Photoshop, and we're going to create three backgrounds, each using a very, very different approach to give you some ideas as to the sort images that you could create as backgrounds for other elements in Photoshop. As you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people who just like you want to learn more about Photoshop. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started making backgrounds in Photoshop. 2. Make Project Backgrounds - Part 1: When you're creating background images in Photoshop, you want to start with a document that is as least as big as the purpose for which you're going to put it. Now I'm going to create something that's going to be able to be used on high definition video. I'm choosing 1920 by 1080 as my document dimensions, but you would select the document dimensions that make sense to you. RGB color mode, transparent background, click Okay. Now I already have selected a ready brown color over here, and that's the color I'm going to be using. I'm going to open up the last pallet here, this is my foreground color, so I'll press Alt backspace, option Delete on the Mac to fill that layer with this color. I'm going to add another layer and I'm going to fill this with the background color and I can do that by pressing Control, Backspace command, Delete on the Mac. Then I'm going to add a third layer, this third layer is going to be a gradient from the foreground to the background color. I'm going to click on the Gradient Tool, First up in the gradient palette is always a gradient that is foreground to background, it's always going to be there, so you select your foreground and background colors, and then you're going to get a gradient that is a mix of those two colors. I'm going to click on it and I'm going to drag down to fill the layer with that gradient, I'm holding Shift as I do so, so it's going in perfectly vertically and I'm using a linear gradient. Now, this has gone in the wrong way round, I wanted my darker color to be on the bottom, so I'm just going to do it again and drag from the bottom up. Now I have a gradient fill layer, a white layer, and a dark ready brown layer. I'm going to turn off the gradient fill layer and I'm going to use the white layer just so I can show you what's happening because it's a little bit easier to see what's happening on a white filled layer. What we're going to do is we're going to work in what's called Quick Mask Mode. There's an icon here, a foot with a tool palette, click it and you're editing in Quick Mask Mode. Now, like masks in Photoshop, this means that you can only work on the document now in black, white, or shades of gray. Gradient has switched over to be black to white. Well, it's exactly what we want and we want a linear gradient. I'm going to fill this mask with my gradient. I want the mask to be darker at the top than it is at the bottom. Now this ruby overlay is indicative of the mask, this shows you the masked area of the document, so right now we've got a mask that is a gradient. Well, what we're going to do now is to turn this mask, this ruby linked mask into a halftone dot pattern. We're going to choose Filter, Pixelate, Color Halftone. Now there is another halftone tool, another halftone filter in Photoshop, but this one gives us a lot more control over what we get, so let me select it. The control we get here is that we can control the radius of our dots. The largest dot at the moment is going to be 20 pixels in size, I can make that smaller by typing 15, I can make it larger by typing 30 or whatever, but I'm going to settle for 20 here. Then our screen angles for this project are going to be all the same and I've just set them to 45, that just gives me a nice dot pattern. I think you'll be happy with that dot pattern, if you set everything, all your four channels to 45 and just click Okay. Now what we've got is our mask has turned into a pattern of halftone dots, but this is just the mask, it's allowing us to make a selection that is a pattern of dots. I'm going to now click back on this icon, which takes me back to editing in standard mode. Let's go back into Quick Mask Mode for a minute. What's happening is that the white areas of this document, the areas where we're seeing through the mask, are going to be selected, so they have matching ants around them. The areas that are this ruby pink color are not selected. Let's go back to editing the document regularly and what we've got is a selection based on that halftone mask, so we've got a selection that is halftone dots, we can use it to punch holes in things. I'm going back to my gradient filled layer, I'm turning its visibility on, I'm clicking on the layer, I've got my selection over the top, I'm just going to press Delete and that's going to punch holes in this layer. You can see that what were the darker areas of the gradient have been deleted more heavily than the areas that were lighter on the gradient and that's because the mask that we created when we created it was heavier with lighter pixels at the bottom and more of the ruby at the top and that's the way the mask works. If you just want to go back and have a look at, I'm just going to the History Panel. Let's go back to just before we exited Quick Mask Mode. This is our color halftone on a Quick Mask, and it's these whiter areas that are going to be removed more heavily than the darker areas of this ruby mask later on. From here, of course, we went back to regular Edit mode and then we just punched the holes out of our document. I'm just going to close down the History Panel, and this is back to where we were. I'm now going to press Control, Alt command, D to deselect my selection. We've got this partially gradient filled layer with the punched out dots over the top of a white background and that's giving us a really interesting background effect. We could even dial down the opacity of this top layer if we wanted to, to get as more subtle effect. You could also use this darker layer, so this is going to give you a darker pattern of dots that you could use for your background, so you get to choose a couple of options here. Let's just say it finished off, I'm going to just drop a shape on top of it, I got a bicycle shape, which is one of the shapes that comes shipped with Photoshop, I'm just going to reuse my red brown color, I'm just going to drag out the bike. This the very first of our background effects created in Photoshop. This one using a halftone filter on a gradient filled mask. 3. Make Project Backgrounds - Part 2: The next pattern we're going to create, we're going to put behind this element and this is from another one of my classes on creating banners and ribbons and also text on a path in Photoshop. This entire banner is in this group here so I can turn it on or off as I wish. We're going to build our background effect behind it. I've got a layer here underneath it. Again, I'm working on an HD video, the document size 1920 by 1080. I'm going to start by filling this bottom layer here with my current background color, which is white. I will press control backspace, command delete. Now I want to add a new fill layer on top of that, but again, underneath this banner, I want to fill it with a pattern. The pattern is from one of my other classes, but you could fill your document with any pattern of your choosing. I'm going to choose Layer, New Fill Layer, and then Pattern. The reason why I'm using this tool and not edit fill is that I can control my pattern scaling through this tool here. I'm just going to click "Okay". The pattern I'm going to use is one of my Chevron patterns. I'm going to use the one, no, it's not that one. I'm going to use the one that has a lot of Chevron. This is this the maroon, light maroon Chevron pattern. Between the zigzag lines is transparency. That's what we're seeing, we're seeing this white layer through it. It's quite a big pattern. It's too big for me here because it's taking over the image, so I want it to be a lot smaller. Just going to dial it down to 20 percent and see what it looks like. Well, 20 is pretty good, but I think probably 15 is going to be better. I just want this to texture the background, I don't want it to take over the image, so this is a good size. I'll click "Okay". The problem with this is that it's maroon and it doesn't really suit this piece of artwork, so what I'm going to do is re-color it. With my pattern layer currently selected, I'm going to choose Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Hue Saturation, and click "Okay". Hue saturation allows me to change the hue or the color of the layers beneath this adjustment layer. All I need to do is to go somewhere across here in the hue slider until I start to pick up a blue that matches or goes well with the blue that I have here, or I'll want to choose some other color that again is going to work well with my blue shape here, but I'm going for blue. I'm going to come up here, this is not going to be indicative. That color on the hue slider is not going to tell you the color you are choosing because you're interacting with some maroon color here. It's a little bit of guesswork to work out exactly where you want to be, but I do want the saturation to be dialed up a little bit and then I'm going to again see if I can find a better match for this blue. Now that I've got that, I'm going back to my layer's palette. At the bottom of the last deck, I've got a white fill black, I've got a pattern with some transparency on top of that, and then my hue saturation adjustment layer that's making the color change from maroon through to this blue. Now this would be a perfectly good background, but I'm going to add one more layer just to show you an interesting effect here. I'm going to click to add the layer immediately above the hue saturation adjustment layer. I'm going to set white as my foreground color. I'm going to open up my gradient tool and select here on my foreground to transparent gradient. By setting white as my foreground color, the second gradient in your gradient panel is always going to be a foreground to transparent gradient. We're going to dump down white in our gradient and when the white runs out, it's just going to be transparent. It's not going to add color in the transparency areas. I'm just going to click on this "Gradient" and I'm going to click on "Radial". I'm going to make sure that I have my empty layer targeted about the middle of my image and I'm just going to drag out. What that does, and you can see it in the last pallet and you'll see it even better when I turn the banner image off, is it's dumping a radial fuzzy white gradient into the document and it's white in the middle and then it phases out to nothing at all at the edges, so it's giving us a glow effect. The glow effect is immediately behind our banner image. This is it without the glow effect, and this is with the glow effect. I just think it finishes off the background for this particular element. 4. Make Project Backgrounds - Part 3: The last pattern we're going to make for our background is a sunburst design. I'm going to choose "File" and then "New". Now the file size this time is going to be a little bit critical. I'm going to tell you what you need. First of all, what you need is a document that has dimensions that are divisible by 200 because we're going to make our pattern piece 200. I'm going to start with 2000 pixels wide and 2000 tall. Even though I want an ultimate document that's 1920 by 1080, I can crop that from my final document. I'm going for a document whose width and height are divisible by 200. I'll click "Okay". Now I'm going to create a document that's 200 by 200. "File", "New" and we're going to choose 200 pixels by 200 pixels because this is our pattern piece and we want our pattern piece to evenly fill the document that we created. I'm going to create a guide down the middle of this document "View", "New Guide", "Vertical". I'll type 50 percent and then click "Okay". I'm going to select over 1/2 of this document using a guide to make my selection. I have a blue color already set as my foreground color. I'll press Alt Backspace Option Delete on the Mac to fill this side of the document with my dark blue. I'll choose, "Select Inverse" to flip the selection. Now, this side of the document is selected. I'm going to click my color palette. I'm going to choose a lighter version of this color Alt Backspace Option Delete. This is now going to be my pattern piece, so I'll choose "Select", "All", and then "Edit", "Define Pattern". Now it doesn't matter that our document was square, and our pattern looks very thin, this is perfect. I'm just going to call it stripe. I'll click "Okay". I'm going to close this document and I don't need to save it because the pattern is already saved. Now our pattern piece is 200 pixels wide, so it's going to evenly fill this document. I'm going to choose "Layer", "New Fill Layer", "Pattern". I'll click "Okay". Now Photoshop defaults to the last pattern that I created. That's what I've got here and it's going in at 100 percent, which means that this bar here is exactly the same width as this bar here. That's really important because we're going to do a rotation next. This bar is going to end up alongside this one. If I wanted to make it smaller, I would need to do it proportionally. I could, for example, make it 50 percent of the size. That would give me more bars, but you'll see I've still got different colors on either end and the bars at either end are exactly the same width. I'm actually going to make mine 100 percent. I'll click "Okay". I'm going to open up the last pallet here and we just have a single layer with a mask on it. I'm going to convert this for smart filters. I'm going to choose "Filter", "Convert for Smart Filters" and click "Okay". This will allow me to adjust that pattern fill later on if I want to. Now I'm going to choose "Filter" and then "Distort" "Polar Coordinates". Now there are only two options in Polar Coordinates, and one of them works and one of them doesn't work. We're going for the one that works, this one here, I'll click "Okay". We've now got our starburst effect. If there are not enough bars in the starburst effect, you can come back in and edit this smart object. We're going to double-click to open it. This opens up the striped pattern that's embedded inside the other file. Now we can double-click on this fill layer and change the scale. I could take this back down to 50 and click "Okay". To see how that's going to work, I'm going to the pattern fill layer and it's a PSB file. All I'm going to do is close it. I'm going to click "Yes" when I'm prompted to save it. Now this pattern fill layer in the original document has been updated. It's got twice as many rays around it, slightly different effect. I think I actually like this better. To texturize this, I'm now going to add a new layer. I'm going to fill this layer with a mid-gray. I've got a mid-gray already selected here. What I did was I opened the color picker and I'm just looking for a color down the side here. On the moment I've got this hue picker on. If I were to choose saturation or brightness, you can see each of these changes the look of the color picker. I've got this hue one selected. That allows me to isolate a pale gray here. I'm going to click "Okay". I'm going to fill this layer with it by pressing Alt Backspace Option Delete. Now I'm going to put some noise on this layer. Now, I could also make this a smart object if I wanted to, because that would allow me to change the amount of the noise later on, "Filter", "Convert for Smart Filters", click "Okay". Now, "Filter Noise", "Add Noise". In the noise dialogue, we're going to have monochromatic selected because if you use nonmonochromatic, it's color noise and it's not particularly pretty. We're just going to use monochromatic noise and we're going to put a fair amount of noise in. I've got quite a high value here. For the noise that we're adding, changing it from uniform to Gaussian is not going to have a big effect in this particular document, so you can use either. Click "Okay". Now we want to blend our noise layer into our pattern layer. We're going to just look at the possibilities in the blend modes. Making sure that we've got the noise layer selected, drop down the blend modes list, select Dissolve. Then on a PC you can just press the down arrow to work through the various blend modes. On a Mac, provided you don't have a brush tool selected here. Something like the marquee tool is a good choice. On the Mac, you can press Shift Plus and Shift Minus to progress down the blend modes. We're just looking for a blend mode that having a nice effect on our shape. I'm thinking that probably soft light or overlay is a nice effect here. If we like what we've got there, we can just adjust down the opacity to blend this in to the layer below. Then if I want to take 1920 by 1080 slice out of my image, I can do so. I'm going to the crop tool, I'm going to select ratio. I'm going to type 1920 by 1080. This now gives me the possibility of getting 1920 by 1080 slice out of this document. I can position the crop overlay wherever I want it to be and just click the checkmark. This is a background that I could use for an element in Photoshop. So let's go now and put a shape over the top of this. I'm going go back and get my bike. It is here. I'm going to select a color for it. Choose shape as the method for placing it in the document. I'm just going to add this to the document. There's our third and final background effect in Photoshop. This time we've created a sunburst pattern using the polar coordinates filter. Your project for this class is going to be to create your own background pattern and then just put an element over the top of it. Maybe something you've designed in my class or another class, or just a shape from the Photoshop shapes collection. Post a image of your final background in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this course and that you've learned some techniques for creating backgrounds for your projects in Photoshop. If you did enjoy this course and if you see a prompt to recommend it to others, please give it a thumbs up. This helps others to identify this as a class that they may want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.