Transcripts
1. Make Patterns with the new Pattern Making tool in Photoshop 2021: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class: Create Patterns with the New Pattern Tool in Adobe Photoshop 2021. 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. In this class, you'll learn to use the new pattern tool in Photoshop 2021. Now Adobe calls this the Pattern Preview tool, but I think it's wrongly named. It's so much more than that. At best, this tool automatically creates repeating patterns for you, and at worst, it provides you with a brand new pattern workspace and a live view of each pattern as you create it. Now in this class, I'll show you a variety of ways to use this new tool and some things to be aware of when you're using it. By the time you've completed the course, you'll be comfortable making patterns with it, and of course, it wouldn't be a Graphic Design for Lunch class if there weren't a bunch of handy tips thrown in. If you're ready to make patterns with the new pattern tool in Photoshop 2021, let's get started.
2. Pt 1 What version of Photoshop do you need: Before we begin this class, a word of warning. The tool that we're going to be using in this class was added to Photoshop in version 2021, which means that it's not available in earlier versions. Because we're concentrating on using this tool in this entire class, if you're using an earlier version of Photoshop, for example, CS5, CS6, even any of the CC versions prior to 2021, then you won't be able to follow this class because you simply don't have the tool that you need. If you're using Photoshop 2021 or 2022 or later, then you'll have the tool that you need to use to continue with this class. Now if you do happen to be using an earlier version of Photoshop, that's just fine because I have a couple of pages on my website that will help you find classes that you can do. I'm going to give you a link to this page. This is a page that contains clickable links to all of my Skillshare Photoshop Classes. I also have a separate page that just concentrates on pattern classes. These are pattern classes that you should be able to create the patterns from these classes in most versions of Photoshop prior to 2021. Now of course they're still appropriate to these later versions of Photoshop, but they do use tools that you can utilize in, for example, Photoshop CS6 and earlier versions of Photoshop CC. Look out for the link on the screen for those particular pages that will help you find my Skillshare content more easily perhaps, and you might be able to find it on the Skillshare site. If you're using Photoshop 2021 or later, then let's get started making patterns using this new feature of Photoshop.
3. Pt 2 Make Your First Pattern: The first pattern that we're going to make with the neutral in Photoshop is this simple pattern of dots, and we're going to use same color dots. Let's start in Photoshop. I'm going to click "Create New", and I'm going to start with a square document because the document that we're creating is going to be our pattern swatch. I'm going to start with a fairly large document. I'm going to choose one that is 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels in size. That's a pretty good size for a pattern. It will allow you to scale it down if you want to make it smaller. There's plenty of room to maneuver with an image at that size. Here's my 1,000 by 1,000 pixel size document. I'm going to add my circle to start off with. I'm going to the last panel. Of course you can get to that by choosing "Window", and then "Layers". I'm going to add a new layer because I don't want my circle to be attached to my background for some really good reasons, as we're going to see as we progress. Now you can create a circle using the Marquee Tool. I'm going to select here the "Elliptical Marquee Tool". I'm going to hold the shift key to drag out a perfect circle. The size of the circle is going to be important for your pattern. If you want a really big circle and not very much space around it, then you would create a big circle. If you want a pattern that has lots of smaller circles in, you'll use a smaller circle, which I'm going to make mine about middle-sized. Now, I'm moving this circle as I'm drawing it by just holding down the space bar. Provided I haven't let go of the left mouse button, provided I still have it pressed down, then I can move this shape around, let go the space bar, continue to increase or decrease the size of my shape. Press the space bar again if I want to move it around, just makes life a little bit easier. I'm going to put it in the middle of the document, but we'll worry about that in a minute. Here is my selection. It's a selection that is a circle. I'm going to select a color to use. I'm going to choose a turquoise color. We can fill this shape with this color a couple of ways. You can do it using the keyboard, and for this, you would press Alt, and then backspace, but you can also always use the Paint Bucket Tool. Just click on the "Paint Bucket Tool", and just dump your paint into your circle. To turn off these marching ends, we're going to select and deselect, or you can press Control or Command D. Control or Command D is a keystroke combination that I suggest you learn to use because you'll use it all the time. Let's go to the Move Tool, and I'm going to move this shape into the center of the document. Now you might be tempted to come up here and try and click these options, but you'll see that they're not actually centering this shape in the document. I really wish Photoshop would behave a little bit better and a little bit differently here, but there are a couple of ways that you can center this. You can just drag it around until you see these lines appear, these are the smart guides. The other thing is that you can select this shape, and then you can press Control or Command A to select everything. Then these tools become available and you'll see that this layer is the one that's targeted, although the whole document is selected because I press Control or Command A. Now we can use these to center the shape in the document. It's just one of those things where Photoshop is not really as nice to use as it should be. I'm going to deselect my selection so that I've turned off the marching ends that were around the edge of the document. I'm going to duplicate this layer, so I have two circles. I'm going to drag it onto the plus sign here, and now I've got two circles. This one, I'm going to place up at the top corner here. This is the way that we would traditionally make patterns in Photoshop is to place this shape at this corner, this corner, this corner, and this corner, but with the new tool, we only have to put it in one place. Let's go and grab this and put it in position. Now, it can be difficult to get it right in position on that top corner. Here's what you can do. Go to "Edit", and then go to "Free Transform". Up here, you'll see that there's nine little boxes and there's a check-mark on, and you want that check-mark to be turned on because you want to take the center point and be able to position it exactly where you want it to be, so we've got this center point selected here. What we're going to do is we're going to position it at x equals 0 and y equals 0. Let's just make it X equals 0, and then Y equals 0, and that places that up in the very top corner of the document. Now we can make this into a pattern and we can do that by choosing "View", and then "Pattern Preview". This is the new tool in Photoshop that does a lot of the work for us. Now you're going to see a warning here that says that it does work best with smart objects and we're about to see why. But I want to show you how it's not working so that you can learn really quickly how to make it work, because it's inevitable that you're going to forget to make this a smart object before you come into this tool at some stage. Let's go and see what happens and how to fix it. I'm just going to zoom out here. This is the new Pattern Maker tool in Photoshop, and what it does is it gives us a preview of what our pattern's going to look like. This is the problem. This little circle in the corner here didn't appear at all four corners, and the reason was because it was over the edge of the artboard when we actually created our document and that's why it's being cut off. It should be a smart object. This is what we're going to do: We're going to come here to this layer, which is the one that's causing us all the problems, right-click it and choose "Convert to Smart Object". Now if you're new to Photoshop, just be aware that every way you click in this dialogue, you're going to get different options. So what you want to do is right-click here so that you get this set of options that's much longer and that has Convert to Smart Object in it, and here we've solved the problem. Now we've got a pattern that looks like a pattern. Now this blue square here is telling us what our artboard used to look like. That's the area that we selected, our 1,000 by 1,000 pixel document, and it's marking out the edge of our pattern. If you want to hide that, go to "View" and go and turn off "Extras", and you'll see that you can just see what your pattern looks like. Of course, you'll need to turn that back on again, so go to "View" and "Extras". Our pattern is now made. The problem is we haven't saved it. To save it, we're going to the new pattern of panel in the most recent versions of Photoshop. This is different to earlier versions of Photoshop. In the past, you wouldn't have had a pattern's panel, but you do now. You can get to it by choosing "Window", and then "Patterns". I have it visible over here. What I'm going to do is just click here on this plus sign, because that will create a pattern from what is in front of us here. I'm just going to click here and say, yeah, I want this to be made into a pattern. I'm going to call this "dots", and click "OK". Now that's saved into the pattern's panel so we can use it in future. Let's just close this document and I'm not going to save it either. Let's go and create a brand new document. This one's going to be much bigger because we want to test and see how our pattern looks. Given that the pattern piece that we created was 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels, let's make a document that's 5,000 by 5,000, much bigger to test our pattern. If you've been following my videos for any length of time, you will know that my preferred way of adding patterns to a document is to choose "Layer", and then "New Fill Layer", and "Pattern". But let me show you another way of doing it using this pattern's panel. From the pattern's panel, you can simply drag your pattern into your document. I'm just scrolling down here because this is the new pattern I just made. I'm just going to drag and drop it into the document. When I go to the last panel, you'll see that this is exactly the same result as we would get if we chose "Layer", "New Fill Layer", and then "Pattern", and chose our pattern. It's just a different way of achieving the same result. If you double-click on this layer thumbnail here, You'll get this pattern fill dialogue. Now, this is important for a couple of reasons. Later on, it will be important if we want to actually change the angle of our pattern. It's not going to be really meaningful for this pattern, but it is meaningful right now in terms of scale. I can make this pattern 50 percent scale, so I'm reducing the pattern size within this document. This is the first of the patterns that we've created. It's a fairly simple pattern, but we have learned the importance of creating objects that are over the edge of the artboard as smart objects in the pattern preview top. But of course, we've also seen that if we don't do it before we use the Pattern Preview tool, we can actually do it when we're looking at the pattern and realizing that we've got problems with it.
4. Pt 3 Make a Pattern inside Pattern Preview: Let's go now and create a second pattern. I'm going to click here on "Create New". I'm going to select a 1,000 by 1,000 pixel document. In this instance, I've got artboard selected because again, I want to show you where accidents can happen. I'm going to click "Create" and let's have a look and see where our Pattern Preview option is. You'll see that it's not selectable here, and the reason is because we're using artboards. If you're used to using artboards in the newer versions of Photoshop, if you're going to use this Pattern Preview tool, you can't be using artboards. Let's just go and close this document because we don't need it because it's not working. Go to Create New and make sure that we have artboard deselected. Well, it's automatically selected for that document size, so I'm going to make sure it's deselected. Now I'll click "Create". Now when I go to View, you'll see that Pattern Preview is enabled. You now know that if Pattern Preview is disabled, chances are it's because you're using artboard. You'd see in the last panel there would be that Artboard option. In the last video, we created our pattern in this view, and then went to View and Pattern Preview. It's also possible to create your pattern entirely inside Pattern Preview. Let's see how we're going to do that. I'll choose View and then Pattern Preview so that we can go into that pattern preview mode. We can zoom in and out. At this stage, I'm going to zoom out a little bit. This is the pattern and this is going to show me what my pattern looks like. Again, if you don't want your pattern to be embedded in your background, and I don't think that's a good idea, and we're going to see why a little bit later, you'll need to add a new layer. I'm going to do the exact same pattern this time, but I'm just going to change the colors of my circle. I'm going to start with my ellipse, shift, drag out my ellipse, position it roughly in the center of the document, fill it with my blue color. I'm going to deselect my selection by choosing Select, Deselect or Control or Command D. I'm going to move this into the middle of the document. Again, I can do that by selecting this on the Layer, and then press "Control" or "Command A" to select the entire document, which gives me access to these tools here for centering that shape within the artboard. Then again, deselecting everything with Control or Command D or select Deselect. My other shape I want to place over this corner here. I'm going to draw it in on a brand new layer. I'm going to this time make it orange color so it's going to be easy to see in contrast to the turquoise one that we already have. I'll go to my Ellipse tool, I'm going to drag my circle out here. I'm going to try and get approximately the same size circle. You can see that it's only filling inside the document, that's just fine. Let's go and add a color to it. When we do that, we're actually saying the whole of the shape. What's happened here is that if we work in pattern preview mode, and just dump a circle over the edge of the document, Photoshop is being tools than it was when we actually created that shape over the corner of the document, and then implemented pattern preview mode. It saved us from making a disaster here. Let's just go select and deselect. We now have our circles in place. Now we can move this shape around all four phases of the shape around, and just try and place them into position. But we're going to be guessing it a little bit in this sense because even though we've got the center of this object selected and it's at 500, 500, which would tell us that it should be centered over the document. It's not actually guaranteed to be centered. Let me show you why not. I'm going to turn that layer off. Let's go and redraw that circle on a new layer. This time I'm going to draw it, so it's definitely no way near in the correct position. I'm going to fill it with my orange color. I'm going to deselect my selection, and now I'm going to move it. With it selected, if I go to Edit and then Free Transform, you'll see that the middle of this shape is pegged that thing 500 and 500. This entire layer is centered inside this particular artboard. But of course, our circle isn't the same distance from this dot as it is from this dot, we would need to move it and we don't have anything more than a guess as to where it should be. If accuracy is important to you, then you'll probably want to make sure that your circle is in the right place manually, rather than rely on trying to position it because we can't position that accurately, because we have no guide to do that. If I go to Edit, Free Transform, it's going to continue to tell me that the middle of this shape is at 500, 500, but that's an actual fact, not in the correct position. It's not nice and evenly designed. Just be aware of that, it might look okay but it's probably not. It would be an accident more than an achievement if you actually got it to be in the right place. If you want to make sure that your circle is in the correct place, then we'll turn this layer off. I'll add a new layer, just clicking here on "New Layer", I'm going to draw my circle. This time, I'm going to draw it in the middle so I can pretty much use the existing circle as a guide to getting this one the exact right size or pretty close to it. Going to fill it with my orange color. I'm going to deselect my selection. I'm going to the Move tool, and this time I'm going to free transform this shape, Edit, Free Transform, and I'm going to make sure that its center here is at zero and zero. So let's go to zero and zero. Exactly the same thing as we did when we were outside that pattern preview mode. But this time we know that this is in the right position because the very center of this circle is right over the edge of the artboard, which means that because this is in the center as well, this distance and this distance and this distance and this distance are all equal. We have a pattern that is mathematically correct. It's a whole lot more accurate than anything that we could draw manually as we've already seen. Of course we can make this into a pattern by again going to our Patterns panel, and just click on the plus sign to add it to the patterns. If you don't need this document any longer, you can just delete it and then open up a new document and test your new pattern. Drag and drop it into the document.
5. Pt 4 Using Shapes and Avoiding Fractures: For this next pattern, we're going to work with shapes. I'm going to show you something that happens when we make shapes as shapes and when we make shapes as pixels. Again, another important distinction. Going to create a brand new document. This one's, again, going to be a 1000 by 1000 pixels, making sure we don't have artboard selected because otherwise we won't be able to use Pattern Preview. I'll click "Create." Now, I'm going to use a shape. If you haven't used shapes recently or not familiar with the changes then your shapes are now going to be accessible through the Shapes panel, so you go to Window and then Shapes. By default, the legacy shapes that were originally provided with Photoshop will not appear in your Shapes panel. If you want to get them, this is what you're going to do. You'll go to the Flyout panel here, the Flyout menu and choose "Legacy Shapes and More." When you click on that, you get these legacy shapes and more added to your Shapes panel. Everything's in groups here, so you might need to poke around to see where the shapes are that you want to be able to use. The one I'm using is from nature and it's this little flower here, so I'm going to select it. I'm going to draw it in my documents so I'm going to the shapes tool. I'm going to draw it using this color here and I'm going to use pixels. We're going to start with pixels to see why pixels is not the world's best choice. Let's add a brand new layer to keep our design separate to the background. Again, we're going to see why later on. We're going hold the Shift key down as I drag out my shape. Because if I don't, it's going to smoosh up and if I hold the Shift key down, it's going to be drawn in the same proportions as it was originally designed to be in. Now this time, I'm going to align it up pretty much using the smart guides. If I can pick up that smart guide. No, can't do it. Just Control or Command A and use these selectors here much quicker. Going to click to add a new layer. This time I'm going to change to a turquoise blue. We're going to drag our flower this time over the top corner here, so let's just go and again, make it using pixels because this is the important distinction that we need to make. Going to make it roughly the same size. I'm going to free transform it with Edit and then Free Transform, make sure the middle of this is at 0,0, so that X and Y values are at 0, so it's positioned across the top corner of the artboard. Let's go to View and then Pattern Preview. Now, as we would expect, the same things happened as happened previously, it's been cut off. Now we can solve that problem one of a couple of ways. We can right-click and convert it to a smart object and so now it's going to behave exactly as we would expect it to. When I rotate it, it can be rotated around. But lets just wind back and lets go back outside Pattern Preview. Up here I have my shape. I'm going to bring it back into the document just for a minute and let's go back to Pattern Preview. I'm going to position it over the edge here and then rotate it. Just doing what I did previously to see that this time when it's just pixels, it's not a smart object. It's placed over that edge, then it's going to fracture when we rotate it, so you just need to be aware that the behavior of these shapes is going to depend to a certain extent where you create them and what you create them as. Again, let's just wind that back. Anything that you want to have placed over the edge of the artboard is going to be better created as a smart object. So let's just go and put up pretty much into position where we want it to be so that it's center is at 0,0. Then we'll turn it into a smart object and then go in to the Pattern Preview option. Not only is the shape intact and it's obviously forming part of the pattern, but it's also able to be rotated without fracturing. If this were just pixels, then it would be fractured if it were placed over the edge. You just need to have your wits about you and if things start to break up, just wind back and make it into a smart object and chances are that that will solve your problem.
6. Pt 5 Use external objects: Let's look now at creating a pattern from objects that you have stored elsewhere that you've bought, or you've drawn, or whatever. I have a document open here and every single one of these leaves is on a Layer by itself. Now that's pretty important in terms of making these patterns. The document itself started out being 500 by 494. It's pretty much a document that I can use, but I would rather it to be square. Because I want to make it square but I don't want to adjust the size of any of these shapes here, I'm going to use the Canvas options, so I'll choose Image and then Canvas size. I'm going to set the new size to 500 by 500. That's just going to add an extra couple of pixels to the top and bottom of this document. You can see the extra pixels have been added here and here. I'm going to this background Layer, and I'm going to refill it with this background color. I'm using Control, Backspace command, Delete on the Mac, but of course, you could just fill it using the Paint Bucket tool. I just want my background to be big enough to actually cover the entire document, so it's just going to be easier for me to work with this pattern. Now, there's another thing that's going to bite me really quickly when working with this design. I've got what's called Auto Select enabled and also Show Transform Controls. What's going to happen with Auto Select enabled is that I can click on any one of these leaves and just move them around. I don't have to actually find out which layer they are in the document, and so that's going to help me a lot. But this is where it's going to bite me, is it's really too easy for me to grab this background. While I want the background to still appear there, I don't want it to be selectable. What I'm going to do is turn it into a background layer because a background layer in Photoshop can't be selected, can't be moved. To do that with it selected here, I'm going to Layer and then New, I'm going to choose Background from Layer. Here it is here. What that does is it converts it into a Background Layer. Probably the thing that you least want to do most of the time but in actual fact, for me right now that's going to help me because I can't select it or I can't move it, and it's just not going to be an inconvenience to me. Now, I'm going to make this into a pattern and I'm just going to use this same document. Of course, I would be working with a duplicate of my document, not with the original. If I don't want to damage these leaves, if I make a mistake but also if I want to have these shapes available for some other purpose, I would make sure that I'm just working with a duplicate of the document. I'll choose View and then Pattern Preview. I'm going to zoom out so that I can see my pattern a little bit more clearly, and from here what I'm going to do is start working with these objects and just rotating them around. Now, because they're not over the edge of the artboard, they're not going to be fractured. You can see that because I've moved this shape over the edge of the artboard, it's now two shapes so that's what it looks like in the last panel. These two shapes are attached to each other, so just be aware that it might look a little bit different to what you're used to things looking like and it might behave a little bit more differently. But you are able to see where you wouldn't normally be able to see your pattern live. I think that that's one of the strengths of this particular tool is the ability to see your patterns as you're developing them, and fix any problems as you're developing your pattern rather than having to create it, test it, come back, and fix it up because there were issues with it. I'm going to make this leaf a little bit bigger, so I'm just holding the Shift key as I increase it in size. Turn off the bounds of the pattern, so it's easier to see what the pattern actually looks like and just decide if that's the pattern that you want. Of course, these objects are still selectable so you can select and move them. I've just got everything turned off so it's not easy to see the Transform Controls, but they are there. Turn the pattern outline and those transform handles back on using View and then Extras. If you're happy with your pattern, then open up your pattern's panel and click the Plus Sign, and then it will be added as a new pattern. You can exit Pattern Preview mode by choosing View, and then Pattern Preview, and you're just taken back to your document. As you can see, the document's changed quite considerably since we brought it into Photoshop, which is one of the reasons why I suggest that you work on a duplicate of your document and not the original. Let's go and test this pattern. Goes the Patterns Dialogue, drag, and drop it into the document. We can double-click on the Layer thumbnail here to enlarge the pattern if we want to. Let's take it up to a 150 percent of its original size.
7. Pt 6 Transparent Patterns and Color Changes: Let's take this pattern one step further. I'm going back to the original document, and I'm going back into my pattern preview mode. Let's zoom back out, so we can see this pattern. Now, one of the things that I've been really concerned about all the way through this class is to make sure that you don't put things on the background layer so that the elements of your pattern are not actually welded or baked into your background. The reason for that is that sometimes you may want to make a pattern that is actually transparent. In this case, I can just turn off this background. What we're seeing behind it is this transparency pattern. So this design is now transparent. Let's take this and make a pattern from it. So again, I'm going to my patterns panel again, just clicking the plus sign. Now, if you're confused because you used to make patterns using Edit and then Define pattern, you can still do it that way. That's just a different way of creating your pattern, but the end result is exactly the same. Let's go back to the document that we're using as a test document. Let's go to the layers in that document. This is the layer thumbnail, which we're going to double-click to open up this dialog because from this dialog, we can select other patterns. What I want to select is the pattern that I just saved, the one that is transparent. Let's go down and select it, and add it to the document. Now we're saying white behind it because this document has a white background, but that background can be removed. In fact, I'm just going to trash that layer entirely. If you want to fill a layer to use as a background when you've got a transparent pattern, that's easily done. This is the way I suggest that you do it, that you choose Layer and then New Fill Layer and Solid Color. Click "Okay", and just choose a color. Any color will do right now. Then drag it below your pattern. The beauty of using this solid color fill layer is this; you can double-click on this thumbnail, and you get the color picker. You can now experiment with different colors. This option works as a sort preview. We're saying this color change behind the pattern. So you can experiment with different colors, you're not choosing a color and going, "Oh well, that's not what I want. Let's go and open this dialog app, or let's flood this layer with a different color and see how that looks." Here we're able to do a live preview. We can determine whether dark colors or light colors are better and the actual background is separate from the pattern itself, which allows us of course also to create different varieties of this pattern. We could take this pattern and do different backgrounds for it to get different results. Be aware when you're creating patterns that sometimes creating a pattern that has actually has a transparent background will work to your favor, giving you more chances of editing your pattern, creating different effects by separating the pattern from the background. It's also of course possible to change your pattern. If you've got a pattern that you like, but want to experiment with different colors, you can do so. I'm just making sure I have the topmost layer selected here. I'm going to add a hue saturation adjustment layer. Layer, New Adjustment layer, and we'll go to Hue Saturation. This option allows me to change the colors in the image. I'm just going to start dragging across it, and you'll see that the colors are changing. All the colors are changing the background, as well as all the colors within the pattern. If you want to isolate the pattern colors and not have the background affected, then you can click here on this clipping mask option. What that does is it creates a clipping mask, clipping the change of color to just the layer immediately below the one we're working on, which is this pattern layer. It's affecting the pattern layer, but not the layer below that which is the background layer. We have less control in Photoshop than we would have, for example, in Illustrator for changing patterns, but you will find that this Hue Saturation adjustment layer does give you some variety in your patterns, so you can change the colors of everything just using this tool.
8. Pt 7 Filter Based Patterns: Let's look now at a special case where we're going to create texture patterns using this tool in Photoshop. But there are some settings that we need to be aware of. I'm going to create a brand new document. Now the size of this document is critical. The width and the height of this document need to be the same, and they need to be powers of two. If we were to multiply two by itself, often enough we would get numbers that look like 256, 512, 1,024, 2,048. They're all powers of two. I'm going to use 1,024. Now the reason for this, is that if you use a power of two, the tool that we're about to use, the filter we're about to use is going to give us a seamless repeating pattern. If you don't use it, you're not going to get a seamless repeating pattern. It's really quite as simple as that. Now we're making sure that we don't have artboards selected because we know Pattern Preview doesn't work with that. The other setting that we're going to be concerned about is using RGB color and 8-bit. By default, it seems to me that right now there's more recent versions of Photoshop are operating at 16 bit. By default, we want 8 bit because the filters we're using potentially won't work on 16 bit images. I'm going to click "Create". I have my default colors here, black and white. I'm going to apply to this document what's called a Difference Cloud Filter. We'll choose Filter and then Render and go to Difference Clouds. Now you can use clouds or you can use difference clouds. It doesn't matter which. The result is that this is a seamless repeating pattern tile because the document is the right size. If it was two or three pixels smaller or larger in any direction, it's not going to be a seamless repeating pattern, but this one is because I'm using 1024 by 1024, which is a factor of two. Let's go into view and then Pattern Preview and see what's happening here. I'm going to turn my extras off for a minute just so we can see what's happening. Let's zoom out. We have a document that is a seamless repeating pattern. This can now be used with filters to create all sorts of interesting effects. But before we do that, what I want to do is to show you how you can get your filter gallery and some of these missing filters back into Photoshop because by default they're turned off. I'm going to choose Edit and then Preferences. On a Mac, you'll use Photoshop and then Preferences. Then you go here to Plugins. At the top of this plugin dialogues, is this option, Show all Filter Gallery groups and names and it's disabled by default. You want to enable it because that will give you access to all of those filters that you can now use with this design, which is itself a seamless repeating pattern. Let's click "OK". Now so that we can edit this later on, it would be a really good idea for us to make this a smart object. I'm going to right-click and choose "Convert to Smart Object". Now, I'm not doing this because of being in Pattern Preview. I'm doing this because if I make my document or this layer a smart object, then the filters themselves will be editable. If I get a filter that I like, but I want to change the settings of it, I'll be able to edit it without having to remove it or wind back the document and start all over again. That's why it's a smart object. Now let's go to Filter and I'm going to use the Filter gallery. Now you might be warned that you can't use the filter gallery with Pattern Preview, that's fine. Just keep going because it's going to work just fine. Now, I've already set up some filters here because I know these work pretty well. A couple of things I want to show you is that you can stack filters on top of each other. I've got a watercolor filter here with high brush detail, low shadow intensity, and texture at about a midpoint. If you want to add another filter, you can just click here and it'll just be added to the document. Stacking filters on top of each other can have really interesting effects. Even stacking the same filter on top of itself multiple times. Now, I'm just going to delete that version because I already have two others as well. I have a palette knife filter and then another watercolor filter. Now you can experiment with these filters. Just be aware that if you've got a line appearing down here, it's because your filters haven't rendered yet, so just give it time to render before you have a look and see what you've got. There's also a word of warning in that some of these filters are going to break the edges of this document. If you use them on this layer that we're working on, then you're going to end up with fracture lines, so you're going to see that this is no longer a seamless repeating pattern. Now there are a lot of filters here. Most of them are going to be fine, some of them are not. You'll want to experiment. If you find one that breaks the pattern, so it's not a seamless repeating pattern, well, that's why we created this as a smart object. You can just come in and double-click on the Filter gallery entry to go back in here and turn off whatever filter it was that caused your pattern to break and try something else instead. That's why I suggest you create your document as a smart object so you get access to these filters. You can experiment with things, you can change your settings. You can also remove a filter if it's going to break the edges of your document. As I said, some will, most of them probably won't. Now, I've already created these filters on top of this document. What I want to do finally, is to change the colors of it. For this I'm going to use what's called a gradient map. A gradient map is a tool that allows us to apply a gradient to this document, so that colors are applied according to the darkness or lightness. If I do a blue to red gradient, blue would it be applied, for example, to the darkest areas of the image and red to the lightest. The in-between bits would be the in-between bit of the gradient. Let's see how that works. Layer, New Adjustment Layer, then we're going to choose Gradient Map that's down here. We're going to choose a gradient to use. I'm going to click this fly out menu. There are lots of gradients shipped with Photoshop. I'm going to just go and pick up one. Let's go and get the purples. Let's go and find a nice gradient to use. Let's select this one. Here you can see that the orange has been mapped onto the darkest pixels. The color over here, these are the darkest pixels in the image. This is the lightest pixels in the image. Anything that was light is blue, anything that was dark is now orange. Anything that's in the middle is going to put these in the middle colors. You can vary this gradient. For example, you can change the color so we can click here. Double-click, and then change the color of this particular stop in the gradient. That will have an effect on the image itself. Now you can change not only the tone, but you can also change the color itself. I'm going to choose a more pink color. You can also change how quickly things change. This little selector here is going to move the change closer to the darker pixels. Less pixels are going to be this yellow color, and more pixels are going to be this pink color. Watch this area here when I drag it out. More area around, this darker area in the image is being called dark, so we're getting more yellow here. You can vary how the colors are actually being applied to the underlying image. The gradient map filter is a really nice filter to use for many of these effects because you can turn black and white into color very easily using that gradient map feature. Now this is a seamless repeating pattern. But if I go to the pattern's panel, you'll see that I'm not able to actually create a pattern from it. I'm going to choose "View" and then Pattern Preview to exit out of Pattern Preview mode. I'm going to select everything with "Select All," and then go to "Edit" and "Define Pattern" because I'm able to create it as a pattern but Photoshop is just being a little bit of a pain in the neck about creating it as a pattern the way that we're used to doing in the Pattern Preview tool. Let's go and test this to make sure it works. I'm going to create a larger size image this time 5,000 pixels by 5,000 pixels. Going to drag and drop my pattern into this document. Again, I can double-click on it here if I want to enlarge it or shrink it in size. Let's take it up to 150 percent. We have a seamless repeating pattern here created based on a difference clouds filter, just making sure that we set up the document at the right size, a factor of two. Making sure that we used 8 bit so that we would have access to our filters. Then using the filter gallery as a means to apply different effects to change the look of the difference clouds filter into something that is a little bit more texturally interesting.
9. Pt 8 Save and Load Patterns: Now we've already talked about the fact that in Photoshop now we have a new Patterns Panel which we can get to by choosing Window and then Patterns. Now alongside this new Patterns Panel, is also a new process for saving patterns. You might be asking yourself, why would I save patterns? Well, there are a couple of reasons. One One you'll want to save your patterns to an external file if you want to, for example, share them with somebody else. But secondly, these patterns are only going to stay here in this Pattern's Panel as long as you don't reset your Photoshop preferences. When things go wrong with Photoshop, one of the first thing that people say to you is, we'll go and open Photoshop, but get rid of your preferences. That means you're going to lose any custom shapes, any custom gradients, any custom patterns if you haven't saved them to external files. Basically, while the patterns look like they're here in the Patterns Panel, they can be easily lost, and if you don't want to lose them, then you'll have to save them because right right they're not saved to disk and they're going to be lost if we reset our Photoshop preferences. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to save this row of patterns. I'm going to select one pattern, of course, that's applied to the document. But doesn't really matter whether it's applied to the document or not, it's still selectable. I'm going to Shift-click this one, so all of these patterns here are selected. If I want to add some additional ones, I will Control-click on them. Control-clicking allows me to select individual patterns, Shift-click selects an entire row of patterns. Once I've got them selected, I'm going to the Flyout menu and I'm going to choose here Export Selected Patterns. In other words, I've selected the patterns and now I want to export them as an external file. I'm taken to the location where Photoshop expects patterns to be saved to. Now that's meaningful if you want to save them for yourself, but if you want to save them to share with others, you don't want them buried here inside this app data folder. You could, for example, take them into your downloads or you can take them to your desktop. You would then be able to easily share this pattern file with other people. But you can also save it for yourself because that would mean that if you deleted your Photoshop preferences, you would still have your patterns available. I'm just going to call this April 2021. That will tell me when these patterns were created and I'll just click "Save". They're going to be saved as a PAT file. Regardless of whether you're saving them for your own purposes or to share or to sell or to give away or whatever, you will want to save them as a PAT file because that's the file format that Photoshop expects patterns to be in. When you want to load your patterns, you will click here on the Flyout menu and go to Import Patterns, and you would then select your pattern file, your PAT file because that's what Photoshop expects them to be in and then load them back in. That's how you would be able to reload your patterns into Photoshop if you were to lose them. It's also what you would tell somebody to do if you give them your patterns, just tell him to go and load your PAT file into Photoshop this way, and then they'll appear inside your Patterns Panel.
10. Pt 9 Save a Swatch for Spoonflower: When it comes to using the patterns that you're creating using this pattern tool in Photoshop, in a lot of instances, you'll be simply creating a document and filling it with a pattern and that's the document that you'll be selling or using online. But for some sites, for example, Spoonflower things are very different. At Spoonflower, you need to give Spoonflower a pattern swatch and there are a few things I want to just cover here. I've created a brand new document and it has a circle on it now. I think I already went and made this in the center of the document. Yeah, it is. One of the things that I wanted to show you was how you could get a same size circle. What I'm going to do is take this particular layer, I'll drag it onto the new icon down here, so I have two circles. I've already selected a color to use, so I'm going to the paint bucket tool and I'm just going to drop paint into the topmost circle. I've got a pink circle on top of a blue one. This pink one, I'm going to move to the top of this document. I'll use Free Transform, Edit, Free Transform. I'll make sure I have the center of this shape selected and I'm going to put it at 00. We know that that's right over the top corner of the document. Now if I go and create the pattern using view and then Pattern Preview, we already know what's going to happen because it's happened to us previously, we're not getting the entire circle over the edge of the design. We discovered earlier that we could just right-click this and choose Convert to Smart Object, and then we will get our finished pattern. Now I'm going to add this pattern to the patterns dialogue. To do this, I'll click the pattern option here, I'm going to click the plus sign, and this will be added as a new pattern. I'm just going to exit the Pattern Preview option. Now here's where we're going to get into trouble because while we've got a pattern that is saved in our patterns dialogue, if we want to send a pattern swatch to Spoonflower, we have an issue. This is not same as repeating pattern swatch. It needs to have this quarter circle over here and here and here and right now the only other version of the pattern we have is trapped here in the pattern's panel. So that begs the question of if you wanted to send this to Spoonflower, how would you do that? The easiest way is to probably just drop this pattern into a new document. Now we already know that this document size is the exact same size of the pattern. But what if we had saved the pattern as a pattern in the swatches panel and we couldn't remember what the original document size was? This is what you're going to do. If you hover over your pattern element here in the patterns dialogue, you will see that you're told how big the pattern was. It's 1000 by 1000 pixels. So you know now that you could create a document 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels, add the pattern to it and you would have a seamless repeating pattern swatch. Let's see how we do that. File, New, I'm going to create a document 1000 by 1000 pixels. I'll click "Create", I'm going to drag my pattern into my document and by default, that pattern element comes in at a 100 percent size. When I double-click on it here, you'll see its scale is 100 percent. Now the other way of doing that would be to add a new layer to this document and choose Edit and then Fill. Now I'm going to fill it with a pattern. I'm going to drop my patterns selector here. I'm going to select my pattern and just click "Okay" and again, that pattern paste goes in at 100 percent. This is as same repeating pattern tile. If we needed to take this, for example, to Spoonflower, we would just save this at this point. We would save it as a JPEG file and that would then be the kind of pattern swatch that we can take the Spoonflower. Just be aware that in some instances, even though this might create a perfectly good seamless repeating pattern when we look at it here in Pattern Preview, when we exit Pattern Preview, we can't save this and send it to Spoonflower because this is not the actual repeat.
11. Project and Wrap Up: We've now completed the video portion of this course, so it's over to you. Your class project will be to create one or more patterns using the new Photoshop pattern preview tool. You can use simple Photoshop shapes or elements that you've created elsewhere in Photoshop. When you're done, post an image of your completed pattern as your class project. Now, as you are watching this video, you will have seen a prompt asking if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class and learn things from it, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes, that you would recommend this class to others and s Secondly, write just a few words about why you enjoyed this class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you see the follow link on the screen, click it and you'll be notified when my new classes are released. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, 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.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
