Dot Pattern: Smart Texturing In Photoshop

1. Trailer: Hi guys, I'm Jamie Bartlett, a graphic designer and hand letterer. In this class, I'll be teaching you how to add a grungy dot pattern texture to your artwork. You can apply it to all artwork including fonts, hand lettering and even illustrations. This texture is built completely inside a Photoshop. It's non-destructive and easily adjustable to get the exact look you want. Once this effect is built, it's easy to copy and paste it on all artwork. For the class project, you'll be applying this texture to any text, lettering or design. You can create something brand new or if you want to jump right in, just use the artwork you've already created in the past. This class is for anyone, even if you're new to Photoshop. I go step-by-step and show you exactly what you need to do to build the texture. I can't wait to see what you guys create. 2. Layer Styles: To show you how to build this effect, I'm going to recreate my title graphic. In here, I have my design and my lettering is on two different layers so that I can put the effect on both of those separately. I also have a background color and then over here, I already know what my colors are going to be. I just made some little swatches I can sample from to make the process go faster. If you have your design, go ahead and open it in Photoshop and then we'll start building the effect. When you create your document, just make sure that your color mode is set to RGB. If it's not, you can go up to image, mode and change it here. The first thing we're going to do is add some layer styles. I'm going to start with the word dot and build on that. Whatever layer you're going to start with first, double-click on it and we're going to start with the color overlay and change it to black. Press "Ok". Every layer needs to start with black for the effect to work properly. We'll be changing the color eventually a different way but in the layer styles it needs to be black. Next, we're going to need an inner glow. I'm going to move my window so we can see what's going on. Make sure your blend mode is set to normal and boost your opacity all the way to 100 percent, change the color here to white, change the source to the center instead of the edge and then we also need to make sure to change the contour to the half round arc. Then the choke, the size and the range are all going to help you adjust how this inner glow works and looks. How much it's feathered, how much it goes in from the edge, all of that. All of that is going to affect how the texture looks in the end. You can play around with it and you can always come back and adjust it once we get further along. I'm going to set mine to about 24, I'm going to boost the range up to about 82. You want yours to start to look something similar to mine. But again, you can always adjust this later. Once you've got that the way you want it, press "Ok". Now, we're going to copy these layer styles to our other layers. An easy way to do that is hold ''Option'' on your keyboard, hover over the FX icon and then click and drag the effects on to your other layer. Do that to all the layers that you want to have this effect applied. You can see now that we applied the effect to the word pattern, it looks a little different than it does in the dot just because the dot is bigger and bolder and this is a different style of lettering. We'll go back and adjust that later. Next, we need to make smart objects out of each of these layers. The reason we're going to do that is so that the filters we apply next are always editable. We can always go back and adjust them later on. To make these smart objects, just right-click on your layer and say convert to smart object. I'm going to do it for dot, I'm going to do it for pattern. I want to show you what that did. If you double-click on the thumbnail of the layer dot, it opens up a new layer and this is the smart object. Those effects that we just built, that's where they are now. If we ever want to adjust those, you just go onto there and then you double-click on ''Inner Glow'' and there's where you can make all your adjustments. If you make any changes in here, make sure to save it so that it updates in the original PSD. We'll just go ahead and close this for now. Now, I want to make the white parts of my letters transparent. To do this, we're going to double-click to go back into the layer styles and we need to adjust the blend if settings. If we move the white arrow, everything white becomes transparent and as you move it closer and closer to black, the more of the colors become transparent and the black does the same thing. The black can become transparent as well. If we just did it this way, it's not very smooth. To make it a little more gradual, we need to split this arrow in half and adjust it. To do that, hold ''Option'' on your keyboard, click on the left side of the arrow and it splits it and you can drag it and you see how that's much more gradual of blend. I'm going to move mine all the way down to the right about there. Then once we have that set, we can press "Ok" and we need to also do that for our pattern layer which we can copy that layer style. We're just going to right-click, say copy layer style, right-click on our next layer and say paste layer style. Now that blend if setting is on the second layer as well. Now, these aren't the colors that I want in the end so now is when we're going to pick our colors and color them correctly. To do that, we need to group each layer individually. Select one layer and press ''Command G'' on your keyboard to group it, and do the same thing for your other layer. 3. Adding Color: Next we need to add a solid color. So go down here to your Adjustment Layers icon, select Solid Color and I'm going to select my cream color, press Okay. Right now the color is affecting the entire document, but I just want it to affect the word dot. So I need to set it to a clipping mask of the group. I'll pull the color fill out of the group, and now set it to a clipping mask by pressing Option on the keyboard, have it between the color fill and the group until you get this little arrow, and then click. Now that color is only applied to that group. I'm going to show you why we applied the color fill it to the group instead of just applying it straight to the layer. If I applied the color fill straight to the layer and set a clipping mask, you can see what happens here. What's happening is that Photoshop is first applying the color fill and then applying those blend if settings. But we don't want it to do that because that doesn't look right. But if we apply the color fill to the group and then set that to a clipping mask, it first does those blend if settings and then colors it. So it preserves our transparency. Now I'll do the same thing for the other group, add another solid color. I'm going to use this dark gray color, put it above my Group 1, and set a clipping mask by holding Option and clicking between the two layers. So now those are the colors I want. 4. Building The Texture: Now we're ready to start building the actual dot pattern effect. I'm going to zoom in to 100 percent just so you guys can really see this and it's nice and clear. The first thing I'm going to do is select my first layer, my dot layer, then I'm going to go to filter, noise and median and this effect rounds out my corners. You can see with median, it starts to round out my rough corners of my letters before it looked more like that and now it looks like that. I'm going to turn mine up to six and you can see that really rounded the corners. Once you have it how you want it, press okay and then we're going to go back up to filter and then filter gallery. Before you go into the filter gallery, you need to make sure your foreground color is set to black and your background color is set to white because some of the filter gallery effects are based on these colors. That step is really important. The first filter we're going to apply is half tone pattern. I'm going to set my size to three and my contrast to zero. Then I'm going to add another effect down here and we're going to change that effect to grain. Change the type of the grain from regular to stippled. I'm going to boost my intensity to about 63 and the contrast to 15. We'll add one more filter and that's going to be stamp. I'm going to adjust light-dark balance to 11 and then bring my smoothness down to two. All these sliders are things you can adjust up and down based on what you want your design to look like. Also, you can see how the layer style that we did interacts with our effects. Because of that inner shadow, our effect doesn't start getting dots until a little bit past the edge. You can always adjust that as well. Hit okay. Now, you can see that texture with the right color applied. Next we need to add one more filter called ripple. We're going to go up to filter, distort and ripple. I'm going to change the size of mine to large and set the percentage to 15 percent and that just roughens up the edges so that the font doesn't look so perfect. Press okay and now we can copy these effects to our other layers. Just like we did before, we can press option on our keyboard, click on smart filters and drag that to our other layer. That duplicates all those effects and applies it to that layer as well. For this effect, I know that I don't want median or ripple. I actually lettered the word patterns. It's pretty imperfect already, whereas the word dot was a font. To get rid of these, I can just right-click and say delete smart filter and I'll do that for ripple as well. Now I'm going to show you how you can adjust your texture if you want. For the word pattern, I want there to be a little more texture showing up. This is where I'm going to go into my smart object by double-clicking on the thumbnail. I need to adjust this inner glow so there's more white and then in the end that will make more texture come through. Double-click on inner glow. I'm probably going to need to turn that choke down a little bit and I'll boost the range a little bit as well. Let's see what that looks like. Press okay. Now we need to make sure to save so that the original PSD is updated and that brought in a little more texture. I like that. This is what it was before and this is what it was after. That looks good. Once you're done adjusting your smart object, make sure you close it. 5. 3D Shadow: Let's zoom out so we can see the whole thing. Now we're going to do the shadow on the word dot, and that's super simple to do. All we need to do is duplicate our group 2 and our color fill. So hold down Shift and click on your "Color Fill" to select both of those, and then press Command J on your keyboard, and that will duplicate those two layers. Now I have two dots, but the one below, I'm going to change it so that it looks more like a shadow. So we're going to change the color to this dark orangey red color. Press "Okay" and then we're going to offset our group. So we're going to select the group and just use the arrows on our keyboard to move it to the position we want. That looks pretty good. I'm also going to adjust the inner shadow of this because you can't see very many dots because the dots starts so far into the letter. Now since I duplicated this group, the white lettering and this dark orange lettering has the exact same smart object. So if I were to double-click on that and go in and adjust the layer styles and adjust that inner shadow, then it would be affecting both of the dots, and we don't want that, we want it to just affect the dark layer. So in order for these not to affect each other, we need to make a unique smart object for the shadow layer. To do that, we need to right-click on our layer, we need to select new "Smart Object via Copy". Once we click that, those two smart objects are no longer the same and we can edit them separately. As you can see here, that made a duplicate, so we need to get rid of the old one. So we can just select it and press "Delete". Now I can go into the smart object and adjust that layer style. So I'll double-click and then go into "Inner Glow". I'm going to need to bring the choke down even further so that the texture is closer to the edge. Let's see what that looks like. We'll click "Okay", make sure to save it and go in and see. I want to make mine even more visible. So let's go back into that smart object and into the inner glow and turn the size down to right about there. Click "Okay", save it and let's see. Yeah, that's much better. That looks pretty good. I'm going to zoom out again, and that's it for the shadow. 6. Background Textures: Now we're going to do the background textures. I'm going to close all my groups just to make this a little easier to look at. So the one different thing about our artwork and our background is our background doesn't need to have layer styles to it because it's not based on any artwork, it is just a solid layer. We need to start by making a solid layer. So I'm going to make another color fill layer. Color doesn't actually really matter, but I'm just going to make mine 100 percent black. Then I'm going to convert this to a smart object by right-clicking on it, saying Convert to Smart Object. Next we're going to add some clouds to our layer. But again, this is very important that your foreground color is black and your background color is white because the clouds filter does take those colors into account. So go up to Filter, Render, and Clouds. Next, we're going to copy our filter gallery effects that we built on our other layers. Not the ripple or the median, just the filter gallery. So if we hold option on our keyboard, click on Filter Gallery, we can click and drag that down to our background. The clouds is giving us a base pattern for the filter gallery dots to be applied to. So it randomizes everything and makes it so it's not a solid dot. Next we need to add the blend if settings so that the black on our background becomes transparent, and just the dots are showing. So we'll double-click on our Layer. So since our background is solid black and white, we don't need to split this arrow because there's no in-between values. For our black to be transparent, we need to move our black arrow up until it gets right about there, until all our black is gone and we'll click Okay. Now next, we're going to group our layer and add a color fill just like before. How are you going to make it? I'm going to make mine just a slightly lighter version of my background color. Click Okay. Now we need to move it outside of our group and set a clipping mask to our group. You can see all of our little texture coming through. For the overall background texture, I want it to be a little more apparent than this effect, which is a little more patchy than I want. So I'm going to go into my filter gallery by double-clicking on it, and I'm going to add another effect, drag it all the way to the bottom and choose diffuse glow. Then we turn the graininess all the way down, the clear amount down to around four, and then the glow amount, adjust how much more of the dots you can see. Let's zoom out so you can see most of our artwork and you can see there's a lot more dots than we had before. We can always increase it or we can decrease it as well. I'm going to leave mine right about there, and we'll click Okay, and I can see there's a lot more dots than there were before. So that's good for that. Now I want to do another layer of this texture. So I'm going to select the color fill and the group of that background texture, press Command J on the keyboard to duplicate it. We'll change the color first so that it's easier to see, and for this one, I'm going to do a dark gray textures, the same color as my pattern. Click Okay. As you can see, since I duplicated the texture, it's the exact same dots just duplicated. We need to randomize that to change it up a little bit. We just need to go into our group, go down to our Clouds and double-click on our Clouds, and we can do that as much as we want and it always just randomizes the cloud pattern. For this dark texture, I don't want nearly as much texture coming through as the lighter version. I need to get rid of some of it. To do that, I'm going to add some Difference Clouds. So we'll select our layer, go up to Filter, Render, Difference Clouds. Then we're going to drag our Difference Clouds right above our clouds effect, and see how that got rid of a lot of our texture. Next, we are going to change the blending mode for the Difference Clouds by double-clicking on these arrows and then changing it to linear burn. Then we'll turn the opacity down to about 73. Click Okay. This amount of texture is more the look that I'm going for. But I want to bring a little bit more back, so I'm going to go into the Filter Gallery, and we're going to adjust the Diffuse Glow, by turning the glow amount up to about 17. Click Okay. Just like the clouds, we can always double-click on Difference Clouds and that randomizes the effect, as many times as we want. If this texture is still too much, we can always go back into the Difference Clouds and adjust the opacity. Now I want to make one last layer of texture just like this one. I'm going to duplicate my texture, change the color; I'm going to choose my dark orange that I used for the shadow here, click Okay. Then we need to randomize it. For this color, I want a little more texture to show through. So I'm going to adjust the Difference Clouds opacity and bring it down to about 65, and that's it for the background texture. You can add as many different layers and colors and randomize it until you get it out the way you like. 7. Adding a Vignette: The last thing we're going to do to finish off this design is add a vignette just to make the colors and the design pop a little more. To start, I'm going to make an ellipse with the Ellipse tool and make sure that up here it's set to path. I'm going to roughly get it about the shape of the document, change the path operations to be subtract, and then come down here and make an exposure adjustment layer. You see that it took that shape and made it into a mass for this layer. Now we're going to bring down the exposure. You can see how it darkens the edges like that. I don't need it that much. We'll bring the gamma up a little bit. Then click on this icon right here and increase the feather to around 250. I'm going to go back to exposure and make it a little less. I'll go ahead and turn it on and off so you can see the different that's still a little too dark for me. So I'm going to turn the gamma down a little bit, more like that. Looks pretty good. That completes my design. 8. Thanks!: That's it guys. Thanks for taking my class, I hope you enjoyed it. Make sure to post your class projects and feel free to ask me any questions on the Community page. If you share your project on Instagram or Dribble, be sure to tag me @Jamiebartlettdesign so that I can see your work. I'll see you next time.