Marble Repeating Patterns in Adobe Photoshop - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Introduction to Making Marble Designs and Patterns in Photoshop: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, create marble designs and patterns in Adobe Photoshop. 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, we'll create marble patterns, textures, and scrapbook papers in Photoshop. You can use this for your own art, for sale, and for sharing on social media. You'll learn how to create a marble texture and how to create it as a seamless repeating pattern. You will also see how to make scrapbook paper that is marbled. Along the way you'll learn some techniques for turning any image into a seamless repeating pattern and for using filters and adjustment layers to create sophisticated effects. By the time you've completed this course, you'll have enhanced your knowledge of working with Photoshop and created some digital assets ready for use and sale. Without further ado, let's get started. 2. UPDATE A Better Starting Point for Marble Patterns: I'm recording this video after this class has actually launched and I've just inserted it into this position for a really good reason. What happened was that after I launched this class, somebody contacted me. Her name is Kim, and she let me know that there's something about the filter that we're going to be using in this class. It's called the Clouds Filter. There's a particular feature of it that I was not aware of, knowing that information makes this class a whole lot easier to complete. I didn't remove the other videos in this class because although we go through a fairly detailed process for creating seamless repeats, the process that I'm going to show you is applicable for any seamless repeat. You could take a texture and create it as a seamless repeat using the process that I'm about to show you in the next videos. But for this particular marble pattern, we don't have to use that process, because we can get this filter to give us a seamless repeat just out of the box. This is the secret to it. The secret to the filter we're about to use is that we have to create a document that is either the size of a power of 2 or a multiple of a power of 2. What's a power of 2? Mathematically, a power of two is the number 2 multiplied by itself over and over again. The result of any of those multiplications is a power of 2. So 2 is a power of 2, 2 by two is 4; 4 is a power of 2, 4 by 2 is 8, 8 by 2 is 16, and so on. The values that are of most interest to us are the values that will give us a document that is a nice size repeat. I've tried 256, it's a bit small; it is a repeat. It just doesn't have enough detail in it to be worthwhile using. But values up around 1,024 and 2,048 are really good. But you can also use values that are not quite that. We could use 512 as the document size, but the way that these powers of 2 work, is that you could also use three times a power of 2. We could take 512 and multiply it by 3. So here is 512 multiplied by 3, it's 1,536. You're looking at powers of 2 or a power of two multiplied by some value. You could multiply 1,024 by 3 and get a value that you could use for a document's dimensions. We're going to go with this 512, but we're going to make it three times 512, 1,536. Let's go to Photoshop, I'm going to choose File and New. I'm going to create a document that's square, and so we're going to type in 1,536. I'm going to set mine to 300 pixels per inch, and we're going to fill it with white. That will make things a little bit easier. I'll click Create. Now when you fill a document with white, you can start off by choosing Difference Clouds. You can choose Filter, and then Render, and Difference Clouds. Then you would do that again, Filter, Render, and then Difference Clouds. If your document started being a transparent document, you won't be able to use difference Clouds because difference Clouds requires there to be actual content in the document. If you have a transparent document, you can quick startup by choosing Filter, Render, and just go to Clouds first of all, so do Clouds the first time, difference Clouds a second time. But if you've got a white fill document, you can use difference Clouds both times. This is a seamless repeat. Ultimately, in the next video as we're going to do something like this, Image, Adjustments, and then Levels. I'm going to drag the mid tone slider here across to the left, and I'm going to drag this one in to the right. In later videos, I'm going to explain why we're doing that and the basis behind it. But for now, let's just go on and harness the power of having used a document dimension that is a power of two or a power of two multiplied by some value. I'll click Okay. This is a seamless repeat. I'll choose Edit, Define pattern. I'm typing repeat marble. You can type whatever name you like for your pattern. I'll click Okay. We're going to fill a larger document with it. File, New. I'm going to use a scrapbook paper size document which is 3,600 by 3,600 pixels. I'm going to use 300 pixels per inch. This document is a little over double the width and double the height of the document that we've created here. That's going to show us that repeat really clearly. I'll click Create and I'll choose Layer, New fill layer and then Pattern. The last pattern in the pattern dialogue down here is the one we just created. That's the one that's selected. As you can see, that's a famous repeating pattern. If you have a really careful look in here, along where the pattern repeat would show if there was a line, you'll see that there is no line through here. We're going to take that knowledge into the next videos, knowing that if we use a document whose width and height is a power of 2 or a power of 2 multiplied by some value, then we're going to automatically create our seamless repeating pattern. We won't have to do it manually. In the next videos, you can be aware of that. I'm going to show you some other techniques for extracting detail out of these patterns and for coloring them. That's going to be applicable to however you create these patterns. But again, thank you so much to Kim for giving me that piece of information and allowing me to share it with you. 3. Pt 1 Create a Marble Design: To get started with our marble effect, we're going to create a new documents. I'll choose file and then New. I'm going to work on a document that is 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels in size. If you want this for example, scrapbook paper, then we could set this to 300 pixels per inch. We are going to use RGB color. At this point. It will help us if we add a white background to the documents. We're going to do that here and click ''Create''. We're going to come over here and select the default colors. The reason for this is that the filter that we're about to apply will use these colors for the filter color. Now later on, if you want to create marble that is pink or blue or something, then you could set a dark blue or dark red here instead of the black. Then you'll be starting with those colors in your marble. But we're just going to settle for black and white right now. Now we'll choose filter and then render, and we're going to use difference clouds. Now if you didn't make this background white, then difference clouds is not going to work. If you have a transparent background, it won't work to save yourself some trouble. If you do have a transparent background, then just go down here to Filter Render and use clouds instead of difference clouds. At this first step, we're going to use difference clouds. Clouds in Photoshop is this Motley effect. This is going to give us a good start for our marble, but we need it to be a little bit darker. To do that, we're just going to reapply the difference clouds. At this point, if you had to use clouds because you didn't have a background, you're still going to come with us on this step. You'll choose filter and then render, and then difference clouds so that you reapplying it a second time. The reason for this is that clouds doesn't add to itself, but difference clouds will add to the current effects. We're going to get a darker result if we use different clouds now. There is a slight difference between how these two options behave. Now, if you had a colored background, you would notice that your colors are going to invert at this stage. If you were using red, they would change to a blue because this is difference clouds, this is make it the opposite color. Just be aware of that likelihood of happening if you're working with color here, it doesn't really matter to us because we're working in black and white. Now it's the black areas in this document that we're going to use as the veins for our marble. Now there are a few ways of extracting that. I'm going to show you a couple. One of them that's quite popular is to use Image and then adjustments and go down to equalize. That pulls the blacks towards black and the whites towards white. You might be familiar with using threshold for this, but threshold is a little bit of a hard heater, tends to be a bit grainy so equalizers is going to be a softer result. Let us go and see what it does. You can see here that now the darker areas are becoming a little bit more apparent, the lighter areas a little bit more light, and there's a lot less in between light and dark. Now, the other tool that you can use which will work with or without this equalize effect applied first is a Levels adjustment or curves you can use either. If you're going to use levels, you choose Image and then adjustments and go to levels. Now, levels is really handy because it allows us to adjust the blacks and whites and the grades. These are the black these are whites are neither grays. If we bring in the black slide, everything's going get blacker, not what we want. If we bring in the white slide, everything's going get blown out or white, not what we want. But the meantime slider will adjust the mid tones, the middle areas. If we take them towards white. Something somewhat unexpected happens, they actually get darker. But if we take them towards black, we're moving these areas, these graze in the image into the white area. Everything in this areas is becoming white. We're actually getting more lighter colors and were just isolating the blacks into what looks a little bit like veins in marble. You can pull this over as far as you want to get the veins to stick out and the rest of it to look like a white or gray marble. Now if you're not happy with the black, at this point, you can use this output level slider. This one is only going to make things darker. If you pull this over, everything just going to become darker. But if you pull this one, everything's going to become grayer. The further you go across, the darks become gray. There's obviously a sweet point here where you're getting a little bit less black in the image. In actual fact, you're black is turning into a dark gray. Now that might be a look that you're going for. I certainly like that look so I'm just going to click ''Okay''. Now it's also possible to get a similar effect to that using curves. I'm just going to undo that and let's go to curves, image adjustments and curves. Now, curves work somewhat similarly in that you get a curve that is from light to dark. If we pull up in the middle of the curve, more of the mid tones in the image are going to be lighter. This is the blacks. We can make them a little bit grayer by pulling up on the curve here. We can make the whites a little bit grayer by pulling down on the curve. You can adjust the image using curves is just really what your preferences and what you want to do with the image, what you want your marbles starting point to look like. You can get some flatter areas of color by inverting the curve. Probably not advice to invert it a lot, but you can apply a slight inversion to it. If you like that effect. What we're looking at here is crafting something where we're getting the vanes out of our marble. Now, I'm less liking that for this particular image, I'm just going to cancel out of here. Let's go to my history and let me just go and get my levels back again. I can just go forward into the levels that I had applied previously cause history is available by choosing window and then history. You can test that out, provided you back out of that curves dialogue by clicking cancel, you could always get your levels back. This is a starting point for your marble. This is the veins in the marble. It's obviously not a seamless repeating pattern yet we've got quite a bit of work to do, to do that. 4. Pt 2 Turn a Design into a Seamless Repeat: To make this marble tile into a seamless repeating pattern, let's see what we'll do. I'm going to open up the last panel because we have a background layer which is locked, which has a marble texture on it. I'm just going to click this little icon here to unlock it. In other versions of Photoshop, you may need to double-click that layer and that will convert it into a regular layer. We're going make a duplicate of this. So we've got two copies of this marble effect. What we're going to do is get Photoshop to curve this up so that the edges will be seamless repeating patterns, the middle will not. We can fix the middle up ourselves. So what we're doing is we're selecting this top-most layer. We know the document is 1,000 pixels by 1,000 pixels in size because that's the size we made it. We're going to choose Filter, Other, and then Offset. In this Offset filter, we're going to type in for the horizontal and vertical values a number, that is half the width and half the height of the document. We made it a 1,000 by 1,000, so half of a 1,000 is 500. SO We're typing 500 and 500 here. We're selecting wrap around and we're clicking Okay. What that's given us is something that is a seamless repeating pattern along the edges. So if you have a look up here, we've got a line that is headed up in this direction. Well, there's the other part of the line. When this tile is placed alongside itself, this entire document is placed alongside itself, this and this are going to line up. Over here, we've got a line and a line. Here are the bits join up to it here. Over here, a line, here, and a line, and a couple here. Well, there's the line, and the line, and the little loop here that joins up with this. The problem is that while the edges are a seamless repeating tile, the middle is not. You can obviously see the edges. Now, there are a couple of possible solutions that you can put in place right now. You could go and get the Clone Stamp tool and you could start cloning things to cover up the middle. There is another alternative and that is to use a mask and to borrow content from the layer that we have below. I'm going to show you this because it's a nice fun approach to take. SO What you're going to do is target the topmost layer and you're going to click here on the Add Layer Mask icon. Now, if you've never worked with masks before, this is a really good time to learn to use them because it's a fun approach. You'll see that the mask is white, so we're going to paint on it with black or white. When you've got the mask selected, it's got a little box around it. So here is the layer selected. See it's little box, not what we want. We want the mask to be selected. So it's got a little border around it. We're going to get a brush. So we're going through the Brush Tool. I'm going to open up the Brush Panel. Now, I suggest that using the Legacy Brushes is a really good idea if you are using a lighter version of Photoshop, say 2019, 2020. If you don't have Legacy Brushes, go to the Gear icon here and click on Legacy Brushes. That just adds the Legacy Brushes to the Brush Preset. I don't have to do that. I've already done it. So these Legacy Brushes are pretty handy because here's some nice circular brushes with a bit of softness applied to them. I'm just going to select one of them. You can see it's a 10 pixel brush and it's got a 100 percent hardness. Well, I'm going to wind its hardness down to somewhere between about 30 and 60. You're going to experiment with that in a minute. The size doesn't really matter right now. You're going to paint with black because it's not the color that's currently used in the mask. At the moment, the mask is showing us everything on this layer here. What we want to do is to paint on this mask, to see the layer below, this layer here. With our Brush Tool and black paint selected, we're going to check that we're painting in normal mode with a 100 percent opacity. We're going to come over the document and we're going to adjust our brush. So I'm going to make my brush a bit bigger, I'm using the closed square bracket K to do that. What I'm going to do is just start painting on this layer. What I'm doing is this, you can see I'm poking a hole in this layer here that corresponds with the area that I just painted. What is behind that area that is transparent here is the image below. So what I'm doing is going through to the image below. I'm going to continue to do that along this line where the two images are joining up. What I'm trying to do is find a little bit of data from the layer below that's going to allow me to build up this effect here in this document. Now, if I want to paint out the black, so if I go too far, for example, with the black, I'm just going to switch my colors. So let me just show you here. I'm going to go through with my black. You can see it here on the mask. This is the black area. If I switch my colors and paint over it, I'm just returning to what the image looked like. So you just going to work between black and white. It will help you if you learn the keystroke for switching between black and white and that's the letter x. So I'm just going to press the letter x, I'm going to get black. I'm just looking at softening this area down the middle here and looking at what I can find from the layer below. I think that I've got a bit too much white here. I'm going to press x and I'm just going to bring in a little bit more of the data back from the layer below, but not across this line. It's important that we remove this line in this process. So I'm just going to say what's happening here. Well, there's some interesting stuff on the layer below that I can use. Now, as I said, a lot of people like to use the Clone Stamp Tool where you're actually painting on rather than revealing content from the layer below. I find that this is a cool little effect and I can get some really nice results. It is a little bit hit or miss because you don't know what's going to be on the layer underneath and what you might find and what you may not find. But I think it's a good way of practicing too using mask, particularly if you've not used masks before. So I'm just coming cross this line and just trying to remove it. Now, this has not been highly successful here, so I'm going to switch my colors, just being careful that I stop away from this line. So I'm not bringing back in that really obvious line across the document. Now, we're going to get another go at this. If it's not perfect, don't worry because we're going to have another shot at it in a minute. When you think you've done a reasonably good job, when you've removed the really obvious look of this line across the document, what we're going to do is we're going to merge these two layers together because what we've got, is a layer that is missing bits and pieces in the middle and the layer behind that is providing the content for those bits and pieces in the middle. So we're going to right-click here and choose Merge Down. That bakes it into a single layer. We're going to do the same thing all over again, drag it onto the New Layer icon. We're going to apply our filter to this. Filter, Other, Offset. The filter is going to default to the exact same values as it had previously so we'll just click "Okay." Then to give us a little bit of variety in what we're going to find behind this document we're actually going to rotate this. I'm going to choose "Edit" transform and I'm just going to rotate it 90 degrees. So that will change up what is available behind this image here. We'll go to this layer, we're going to add a mask exactly as we did previously. We're going to target the mask to make sure we're painting on it. We're going to look around the document for things that are causing issues along this center line. Because if there is a problem in this document, if there's a line in this document, it's going to be across the center. If you're having a bit of trouble seeing where the center is, you can choose "View" and then "Rulers." I've already got those turned on. For me that means because my document is a 1,000 by 1,000, the middle line is at 500 and I can read 500 off here. So I know that this is the area in which there's likely to be problems and there is a problem just right there. I'm going to go and get my brush, I'm going to scale it down a little bit, and I'm just going to try and eliminate the line in this position. That looks quite good, it's a quite good removal here. We're going to check up here around the 500 mark is where they're going to be any more potential problems. Let's just zoom in here. I'm not seeing any problems, let's just go down the document keeping an eye on that 500 mark. To move it, I'm holding the space bar as I just drag it up and I'm looking for problems. There's a slight problem at the 500 mark. Again, making sure that I'm painting in black, I'm just going to paint out that obvious same there. There's a bit of interest that I can get in here, so let's go and grab that while we're here. We're working on our mask when we turn the bottom layer off, you can see that we've poked some holes in our documents. We're going to have to do the same thing as we did previously, right-click and merge those two layers together, will make a duplicate and we're going to again apply that offset filter to this, filter other offset, click "Okay." At this point again, we're looking for any difficulties along these lines. Now I'm not really happy with what's happening in the middle here, so let me just rotate this layer at the back to give me something a little bit different to see in the middle of the document, let's go and add a mask, let's go to our paintbrush, let's make the paintbrush a bit larger, and at this point, let's just paint over this middle area to see if we can get something a bit better in the middle of the document. Now at this point, pretty much half of the time that I do this, I get a result I like, and about half the time I do it, I get a result that is maybe a little bit of a problem. Still not really happy with what's happening right in the middle of this document. It's probably time to switch across to the Clone stamp tool. To do this, I'm going to click to add a new layer in the document, I'm going to select the Clone stamp tool and I'm going to make sure that set to sample all layers. Now the way the clone stamp tool works is it's a brush so you can go and select the brush to use on it. I am just again using a circular brush. I'm going to bring the hardness down to maybe about 72 percent. You're going to hold the Alt or Option K over an area that you want to sample. What I'm thinking of is filling in this area here and I'm thinking I could probably use a little bit of maybe here to sample. I'm going to Alt or Option click on this. Now I can reduce the size of my brush as I paint to just join things up. We're getting this little overlay which is showing us what we're about to paint. Now you can go and sample from different areas. For example, if I'm looking for something to join this up with here, I could go and sample this, and I'm just looking at how it's all going to line up. So I've created a shape here that wasn't in the original piece of marble. If we want a little bit of gray in here, then lets go and sample a little bit of gray and let's just paint it in here. Again this is why you want a soft brush so that you get a soft edge to it. I think my brushes too hard, so I'm just going to wind down the softness, going to undo that and let's try that with a bit more softness applied to it. Now we could do the same thing in here and add a bit of gray. Again go and sample some gray and just come in here and just brush it in, keeping an eye on the little plus sign over there, which is going to tell you what your sampling. So you can check and make sure you're not about to paint in a line, for example, where you didn't want to paint in a line. Not really reasonably happy with using this line. I think I'm going to borrow it there. Go and sample that, and just use that line in here. Try and find some grays to go in here, I'm thinking this is probably a good spot to sample from, which I could probably get a nice set of grays in here. Applying the Clone stamp tool on a layer by itself is a really good idea because it means that if you do something that you don't like in a minute, you could go and erase it and you don't have to reapply the effect, you can just erase it from where you put it. I'm thinking I'm going to sample a bit of this line over here. Provided you use small enough elements, you're not going to get the look of something being repetitive because you're using bits that have come from different areas and you're making up your shape as you go. When you're happy with what you've achieved, your going to merge all these layers together. Click on the top one, shift, click on the bottom one, right-click and choose merge Layers. Now provided you've stayed away from the very edges of this document, this will be a famous repeating pattern. Let's see how we'll do that. We'll choose, select then all, and then Edit, to find Pattern, and we're going to call this marble 1. To test it out, we'll create a brand new document file and then new, I'm going to test this out in a document that is scrapbook paper size, 3,600 by 3,600 pixels at 300 pixels per inch resolution, I'll click "Create." Now we'll choose layer, new fill layer, and then pattern, I'll click, "Okay." The last pattern that I created is the one that's going to be used to fill this document. I'm going to make it a little bit bigger. I'm going to scale it to a 165 percent of the original and click "Okay." There's our first marble document created as a seamless repeating pattern and used here as a sheet of scrap of paper. 5. Pt 3 Make a Second Marble Design: For our second marble texture, we'll go through a similar process so you're going to see some repetition, but we'll also look at some other options for things that you can use as you go along. We're also going to create a lighter marble this time. I'll choose File New. I'm going to settle again for my 1,000 by 1,000 pixel document. I'm going to increase the resolution to 300 pixels per inch. I'm using black and white as I was previously. We'll choose Filter and then Render, and Difference Clouds. We're going to do that a second time. You'll notice that when you select the Filter menu, that Difference Clouds or the filter that you last applied is the one that selectable at the top. You can save yourself a trip all the way down here to Render and Difference Clouds and just click it up here. Again, we want to get the dark edges out of this document which is equalize, or levels, or curves, I'm just going to use levels. Image, Adjustments, Levels. The reason why I like level so much is the ability to turn black into gray using the output levels. Let's just drag over the mid point here and let's increase the output levels just to get this a little bit more gray and a little bit less black. If we want a bit more white in here, we can just drag in and that's going to make some of these areas a little bit whiter. I'll click "Okay". Now, there are some interesting filters that you can use and apply to this marble effect before you go ahead and create it as a pattern. One of them that I like to look at is the Ripple Filter. So you'll choose Filter and then, Distort and go to Ripple. Now, in this dialogue here, let's just increase the size of things here. You'll see what it looks like before and afterwards and so, the Ripple Filter is adding a little bit of rippled effect along these lines and you may or may not like that effect. You can dial it up or down as you prefer. Just click on it to see what it looked like before and what it looks like afterwards. I'm going to apply it, I'll just click "Okay". The other filter that I like to use is the Diffuse Glow. Again, filter, and this time we'll go to the filter gallery. The diffuse glow filter is in the distort category, so just click on "Diffuse Glow". Now, whether it looks good, just by starting up the filter gallery or not will depend on the settings here. I like to use zero for graininess. If you wind it right up, you end up with a really grainy lock, which on a lot of images looks really good, but it's not really suitable for marble. I'm winding the graininess all the way down. I want a little bit of a glow, but obviously, too much of a glow on a document that's already pretty light, is going to be too much. So you can just increase the glow to maybe one or two to get the look that you're looking for and the clear amount is going to bring back the underlying image. You want a clear amount that's fairly high, not perhaps all the way up. This is what it looked like, this is what it looks like now. It is a lighter marble effect. I'm going to click "Okay". Now, another thing that you may be familiar with if you're familiar with marble, is that some of these lines that go through it often will have things that look like gold in them or something that is another color. Well, we can extract those lines and color them. To do this, we're going to choose, Select and then Color Range. Now, Color Range allows you to sample colors in an image and typically, when we're using it, we're looking for a color like reds or blues, but you can also look for highlights, mid tones and shadows. Highlights is going to select all the highlight areas, the light areas. Mid tones, the middle tones in the image, and shadows, the darkest areas. Well, I'm going to use shadows even though these are probably more mid tones. I'm going to adjust the fuzziness and the range to get a few little elements selectable in here. I'm looking for a little bit of white, just to tip of the areas where I'm going to add a bit of color and fuzziness, you can adjust that, you can see that we could pick up all of these lines, or we can pick up just the heavy part of the lines. This is a pretty good selection for me, so I'll click "Okay". Now, what we're seeing selected here are just the pixels that are 50 percent or more selected, but there are other selected, you're just not seeing the marching ends around them. What we're going to do is we're going to copy these areas onto a new layer. We'll choose Layer, New, and then we'll choose Layer Via Copy. That's going to leave the background of the image intact, the pattern that we've got so far intact, it's just going to jump these darker areas, a copy of them onto a new layer. When I turn this off, you can probably see in here, we've got these little gray bits. But they're also on this layer. Now we need to color them and we're going to do that with a Hue Saturation Adjustment, Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Hue Saturation. We're going to color them gold. Let's go to Colorize, and let's go and find a of gold color, which is going to be in that orange area. You can increase the saturation a little bit and perhaps, increase the lightness. Now, the problem with this is that it's affecting the whole image and not just the bits that we sampled and copied to a new layer. This icon here will allow you to limit this Hue Saturation Adjustment layer to affect only the layer immediately below. So as soon as I click here, you'll see that the gold is only now in those areas that we had selected and which appear on the layer below. It's becoming a highlight in the pattern if you like. At this point, you can go ahead and adjust just how dark you want it, how much saturation you want in the color. This is the lightness and darkness slider. Obviously, it jumped and this is going to be your color. When you're happy with that, just close down the dialogue. Now, at this point, it's all still editable but if we're going to make this a seamless repeating pattern, then we're going to have to put this all together. We're going to select all of these layers, right-click and choose Merge Layers. Then we're going to do exactly as we did previously and we're going to either clone or we're going to use a mask to join these things together to make a seamless repeating pattern. I'm going to unlock this layer, I'm going to make a duplicate of it. This one, I'm going to apply the offset filter to. Filter, Other, Offset. Now, you're going to apply that offset filter to the image regardless of whether you plan to use the clone stamp tool or the masking option. If you're going to use the clone stamp tool, you're going to add a new layer and start cloning. If you're using the masking option, you're going to add a mask to this top-most layer and you're going to target the mask, you're going to select a paintbrush, you've got to make sure it's set to normal and probably something like a 100 percent, you're going to be painting in black, and you're going to increase the size of your brush and you're just going to come in here and start trying to get rid of this line. Now, this first run is not going to be highly satisfactory. That's just fine because we can do it over and over again until we get it right. Right-click and choose Merge Down. Make a duplicate. Go back and apply the offset to this. I suggest you rotate this bottom layer a little bit by choosing Edit and then Transform and rotate it 90 degrees counterclockwise. Then go back and fix up any problems and the problems are going to be at this halfway mark. I'm going to add my layer mask here, make sure I'm painting in black and just come in here and try and soften this edge. Run across the middle of the document just looking for anything that isn't obvious line in the document. Any other problems are likely to be at the 500 mark over here. Well, here's the 500 mark. I'm just going to soften that. I'm holding the space bar to move through the document, just checking this 500 mark, just to make sure that there's no visible lines in there because they are going to show up in the pattern and as we would expect, there are potentially problems at the very edges. Were happy with this at this point. Right-click and choose Merged Down. Take another duplicate, apply the offset filter to this. The problems at this stage are going to be in this middle area. You can rotate this bottom layer if you like, or you could just start cloning at this point. I'm going to start cloning. I'm going to add a new layer here. I'm going to the Clone Stamp tool, I'm going to make sure I'm selecting all layers, and I'm just going to start cloning in here, making sure that the opacity on my brush is about halfway opaque. That will allow me to get a softer result. When you're happy with what you've achieved, just select everything and merge the layers together. You can now test your pattern by selecting everything with Select, All, and then Edit, Define Pattern. We're going to create a brand new document with File, New. I'm going again make this scrapbook size and click "Create". I'm going to fill it with Layer, New Fill Layer and then Pattern. I'm going to increase my pattern to about 165 percent and click "Okay". There's another one of these marble patterns. This one has got some highlight color through it. 6. Pt 4 Recolor a Design: Once you've created a single marble, look if you're really happy with that, then you can go ahead and color it. Let's have a look in the last panel, we've got our layer that has our pattern in it. We can add a Hue Saturation Adjustment to this layer. With Layer, New Adjustment Layer and then Hue Saturation. Now again, we're going to choose to colorize it and we're going to choose a color to use. If you wanted to add turquoise color through your pattern, you could do so. You're going to adjust the saturation. Taking it to the left is going to make it more gray, taking it to the right is going to make it a whole lot more intense. You probably want some subtle effect here. Lightness will lighten it or darken it. Now, in addition to applying the Hue Saturation Adjustment to the image in normal mode, you can also blend it in. I suggest that you dropped down this list and select something like dissolve. Then on a PC you just going to press the down arrow key. This will let you look at various blend modes and see how the Hue Saturation Adjustment layer interacts with the rest of the document. When you get to the bottom, which is the luminosity blend mode, you're going to have to press the up arrow key to go back up. Now, on a Mac, you can do something similar, but you need to be choosing over here a tool that is not a brush tool. For example, you could select just the Marquee Tool. Then you're going to select the first of these blend modes and use shift plus and shift minus. Unlike the PC, on the Mac, when you get to the very end, you just scroll around automatically and start back over again. If you find a blend mode that you like, you can also adjust the opacity of that. Here is a blue lock to our pattern. Well, I can adjust the opacity of that down a little bit to get a mix between the layer underneath and this color layer. You can see it's got a hint of blue through it. Now in addition to Hue Saturation Adjustment layers, you can also apply what are called Gradient Maps. Again, selecting this, we can choose Layer, New Adjustment Layer, and then Gradient Map. Now, these adjustment layers are also select-able here using this little icon that has a black and white on it. We're just going to go and choose Gradient Map. Now, the way gradient map works is that it applies a gradient across the image and this area of the gradient is applied to the darkest pixels in this area to the lightest. We're going to click here and go and get some colors. Now, this is what the Gradient Editor looks like in Photoshop 2020. In earlier versions of Photoshop, it just looks a little bit different. It's just that the gradients are grouped together now and there are more of them. You can select a gradient that you like the look of. I'm just going to go with the purples here and let's go and get this gradient. It's very ham-fisted, but that's fine because there are ways that we can adjust it. I'm going to click okay. Now, we can reverse it so we can make the colors go in a different direction. So the lights and darks are mapped differently. You can also blend it in obviously, so let's just try different blend modes. This is a really interesting blend mode, the Screen Blend Mode, and you might also get some value in the Contrast Blend Modes and they're Overlay, Soft light, Hard Light, Vivid Light, Linear Light, Pin Light. Soft Light and Overlay are probably the winners here, they're likely to give you some results. Less likely to get anything of value in these different subtract and divide blend modes, you might get something in color. Well, obviously, you're getting quite a lot of color here. I'm going to go for something like Soft Light. Now it's also possible to adjust the gradient itself. Let's just go and double-click on this gradient here. You'll see these pinks that are being applied in the image, here they are being applied at an opacity of a 100 percent. Well, you can dial down that opacity. You could, for example, make it 25 percent, and that will help you to adjust the way that this gradient is being applied to the image. There's lots of things that you can do here. You can also adjust the opacity of the entire gradient rather than just one or more stops of the gradient. This would be a method that you could use once you've got a Marble Texture that you like, that is the same as repeating pattern is apply it to a document that you're going to sell or give away, for example, Scrapbook Paper Size. Then go and apply your Gradient Map or Hue Saturation Adjustment to it, so that you are able to create various color-wise of that document and all of these would be salable as a group of Marble Texture Patterns. 7. Pt 5 Creating Marble Scrapbook Paper: Now, up until now we've been creating seamless repeating patterns. But if you were just creating scrapbook paper and if you don't care that you're not creating a seamless repeating pattern. You can just start with scrapbook paper sized document. I'll choose File and then New. I'm just going to create a document that is scrapbook paper sized 3600 by 3600 at 300 pixels per inch. Now I haven't created a filled background here, so I am not able to use my difference clouds. I'll choose Filter and then Render, and I'll just choose Clouds. That populates this with clouds and now I can use different clouds Filter, Render, and then Difference Clouds. That's going to darken this up. Now I'm going straight to a levels adjustment to pick out my black edges, Image Adjustments and then Levels. Here are my dark edges but you can see I've got also a lot of darkness in this image. I'm going to drop down my output levels, so my blacks are a little bit more gray. I can also make the lighter areas of the image just a little bit lighter by dragging in here on the white slider. Now you could also go, and apply a curves adjustment, Image Adjustments and then Curves. Curves let's you lighten the image and so you're just going to pull up on the curve. These are the darks in the image, these are the lights in the image. You can make the darks darker, or you can make everything lighter by just pulling up, you can make everything darker by just pulling down. You've got quite a bit of control over the image here, and if you've never used curves before this is a really good time to use them, because you can't do much damage to the image you're just looking for an effect. You can get a bit of practice with what happens when I pull up on a curve and what happens then when I pull down on a curve. You can also upset your curve, that's not going to help us here, but you can invert a curve. You won't want to do it here. That's probably not going to give you the results that you want. I'm just going to lighten this image here a little bit and click Okay. Now there are also other ways of applying some data out of this image. You can make a duplicate of this layers, I'm just going to drag this layer onto the new icon. I've got a duplicate here. If you want to darken it you can set the blend mode of the top layer to multiply and that darkens it. If you want to lighten it, you can set the blend mode of the top layer to screen and that's going to lighten it. You can also just dial down the opacity, so that you get a little bit of lightning but not a fully lightened version. Now, it's also possible to rotate one of these layers, so if we take this top-most layer and rotate it with Edit, Transform, and then Rotate 90 degrees Clockwise. It's running in a slightly different direction to the layer below, now I've got the opacity dial down, we're seeing the effect before we're actually talking about it. Here is one layer and here is another layer. They're identical. It's just that one has been rotated. Well, you can apply those same blend modes to this. If you apply multiply, everything's going to dark and but you can see it's also getting a whole lot more intense because the content on the layers are not on top of each other, they're being rotated around. There's more detail in both layers which are being added together here using the Multiply blend mode. If we go to screen, then everything's going to get a whole lot lighter. We would probably want to drop down the opacity a bit. We're getting some of the layer below, but also some of this layer, but it's just filling in some gaps so we're getting a little bit of darkening. But again, an interesting effect. At any point you can settle on this effect by just right-clicking and just choose Merge Down. Of course, you can do the same thing with the color range command to color things. With this layer selected, you'll choose, Select, and then Color Range. You're looking again at the shadows. Let's just dial this down. I'm looking for the lines that are in the image so that I can apply some color to them. I could obviously get a lot of the lines or I can get a little bit of the lines. I'm going to settle on what I want and click Okay. We're going to jump this content to a new layer with Layer, New, Layer Via Copy. That's putting these gray bits on a layer all by themselves. That means we can recolor them. Layer, New Adjustment Layer, and we'll choose Hue Saturation. We'll turn colorize on because we want to colorize this layer and we're also going to limit this color to just the layer below, which is the layer that has that content on it that's just the darkest of these pixels. We can pick our color. Obviously gold, orange color looks really good. We can lighten it or darken it. It's only affecting just these areas that we've picked out of the base image. This would be able to be used as a sheet of scrapbook paper. It's not a repeating pattern, but if it's a sheet of scrapbook paper, it doesn't have to be a repeating pattern. You could just start with a document of the exact size that you want to end up with. There's your scrapbook paper and then add some hue saturation adjustment layers to the image or a gradient map, and you can create a whole series of papers from this one element. If you're going to add a gradient map or if you're going to add a hue saturation adjustment, do it to just this layer, not the layer that's got the gold on it because you want to use the layer that's got the gold on it. You can just pop your hue saturation adjustment layer or your gradient map just in this spot here. Lets go and apply a gradient map. We can say that the gold area of the image is still being picked out. Let's go for this color here, but let's just dial down the opacity. A fair bet. The gold is here. It's being retained because it's above the hue saturation adjustment layer, so it's not changing color. This is just changing the color of this base layer below. I hope that that's given you some ideas as to how you can create your own marble effect and the things that you can use to create it and really it is anything goes. But you also have the skills for turning this into a seamless repeating pattern, if that's what you want to do. If you just want scrapbook paper, then it's probably easier just to start with your 3600 by 3600 pixel image and just create your marble texture here and you're off and running. 8. Pt 6 Using Marble as a Photo Texture: Until now, the marble effects that we've been creating, we've been sort of targeting as scrapbook paper or seamless repeating patterns. There are other ways that you can use them and I just want to show you with this image here. You can use them to texturize a photo. What I'm going to do is add a new layer here with layer, new fill layer, and I'm going to apply one of my famous marble textures. I'll click "Pattern" and click "Okay". This is one of the marble textures that we've created. I'll just click "Okay" again. Now obviously, by placing this marble texture over the top of the photograph, we've blocked out the photograph, but we have plenty of blend modes that we can use. I'm going to select dissolve and then start pressing the Down Arrow key. As I do, you'll see that the marble texture and the image below are interacting with each other. Each one of these blend modes will bring something to the party. Some of them might give you nothing very much at all, some of them might give you something that you don't want, but all of them will blend the two images together. It's just up to us to find something that is an effect that we like. I suggest that when you're working with these marble textures of a photograph, that you go all the way to the end and just see what you find and then come back up. Because by then you'll have an idea as to what the texture will bring to the image. What I'm looking for right now is for the texture to have some effect on the painted woodwork here. I actually think that linear burn is going to be my texture of choice because it's adding a little bit of dimension to this building. The building was quite intact. But if we turn on this layer, we can see that the marble effect is actually texturizing the building. I quite like that effect. I don't want the opacity to be as high as it is. So I'm just going to dial the opacity down. Now I want to remove it from the areas that I don't want to have the effect showing, for example, on the door. Well, we already know about masks because we've been using them up until now to create a famous repeating pattern. Well, we can use this mask here to remove the texture where we don't want it. We're going to select the mask, we're going to select a paintbrush, and we're going to select black paint. Now if I just paint on the image, you'll see that I'm applying the paint to the mask and everywhere it were, I paint a black paint onto the image. It's not actually painting black onto the image, what it's doing is it's removing that texture from that portion of the image. I want to leave it in areas like this, but I don't want it to appear in the window. Since the texture is pretty open, it's probably not going to be a lot of work for me to remove it because I don't need to be 100 percent accurate. I do want it to appear on the back wall here, so I'm going to make sure that I don't remove it from that. But I probably will remove it from the chair and certainly from these windows. Now I'm using a fairly soft brush. When we have a look at the brush, you can see it's got a hardness of about 39 percent. That's what we call a soft brush. It's got a sort of feathered edge to it. So it's not going to paint in hard lines, which is going to mean we need to do a whole lot less work with the brush to actually remove the texture from the areas where we don't want it. Let's see what we've got. This is the image as it was when I downloaded it from unsplash.com. This is the image with my texture on it, the texture being applied in the areas where I think it's going to give some visual interest to the image, but being removed using this mask from areas where I don't want it to appear. There's another potential use for these marble effects. They don't have to be front and center, they can be used as textural elements. Of course, they're salable as textural elements because people will buy textures like this to add interest to their images. 9. Project and Wrapup: We've now finished the video content for this course, so it's over to you. Your project for this class will be to create something in terms of a marble pattern. Now you might create a seamless repeating pattern and fill a document with it or you might simply create a sheet of scrapbook paper with this marble effect. Post an image of your completed work as your class project. Now as you are watching these videos, you would have seen a prompt asking if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class and learned from it, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes, that you did recommend the class. Secondly, write even in just a few words why you enjoyed the class. Recommendations like this help other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you see the follow link on the screen, click it to keep up-to-date with my new classes as they're 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.