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

1. Metaball patterns in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch Class, Metaball 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. Today we're looking at a metaball shape and we're going to see how we can create a metaball shape and we're going to do it in two ways, and then how we can make patterns from it. There's a whole lot of learning in this class, there's some really interesting techniques for creating organic style metaball pattern. You're also going to learn some really valuable shape manipulation techniques when we create the more regular metaball shape. In each case, having made a metaball shape, we're going to use it to create some interesting patterns. Now, as you're watching these videos, you're going to see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up, and secondly, write in just a few words why you're enjoying this class. Recommendations like this help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave 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. If you're ready now let's get started. We're going to create metaball shapes in Photoshop and create patterns from them. We're going to start with a more regular metaball shape and then we're going to move on to creating an organic metaball shape. 2. Pt 1 - Make a Metaball Shape: Before we start on this class, I just want to explain how it's laid out. First of all, we're going to use shapes to make a custom metaball shape. We're going to do that for Photoshop CS6 and CS8 users. If you're using Photoshop CS5, then you should skip to the very last video, because I've created a special video for you, to show you how you can create the shape in earlier versions of Photoshop. Then if you're a CS5 user come back because you're going to see how we can use that metaball shape in making some patterns. Then for everybody, regardless of what version you're using, we're going to look at a really cool technique, and I'm sure you're going to be excited about it because the pattern is really fluid and uses some really interesting techniques. So we're going to make some patterns using that technique. But first off for CS6 and CS8 users, here is how to make a custom metaball shape in Photoshop. To create our basic metaball pattern we're going to actually create a metaball shape. I'm going to choose File and then New. I'm just going to make a 400 by 400 pixel document RGB color mode, but it is going to have a white background because it's going to be a little easier to see what's going on, and I'll click Create. I'm going to press Control or Command 0 just to zoom this up. I'm going to work with the Shapes. I'm going to the shape category here and I'm going to select an ellipse. I'm going to make sure that I'm working with shape that's critical. In earlier versions of Photoshop, your shape is just going to fill with a fill and you wanted to have a Stroke option. If you're working in later versions of Photoshop, turn this Stroke option off, you just want a fill. Otherwise this is going to get really really complex very very quickly. I'm working with Shapes and just a fill color, we're going to hold Shift and drag out a circle that is just under half the size of this document. So this is about 160 pixels wide and high. My document's 400 so it's just under that. We're going to ignore what's happening in the Properties panel. We're just going to look at the circle shape that we have here. I'm going here to the Move tool. I'm going to move this circle into position so that it is aligned against the center lines in this document. So you can see that the smart guides are appearing here, to an exactly the right position now. Now I'm going to Layers palette. I'm going to make sure the Layers pallet's visible because I'm going to need to see what I'm doing. I'm going to drag this ellipse onto the New Layer icon. So I've got a duplicate. Still with the Move tool, I'm going to drag this one out of the way and I'm going to drag it so that either again, touches these guides. Then I'm going to take a copy of both of these. So I select both these shapes, drag them onto the New Layer icon. With them both still selected and the Move tool selected, drag them down and just make sure they snap into position. Now I'm going to take all four shapes and I'm going to rotate them. So I'm going to hold the Shift key as I rotate them around and then click the check mark. Now I have the four shapes that I'm going to be working with, and they're all neatly aligned so that they're touching perfectly. Next up I need to create a square shape. I'm going to the Rectangle tool and this time I'm going to make it a different color. I'm going to make it black. It'll just be a little bit easier to work with if you can see it as a different color. I'm going to drag to create a square here. I'm going to hold the Shift key as I do it. I'm going to use the Space bar to just align it into position here. Because what I want it to do is to just touch with its corners exactly where the circles are intersecting. Now I might want it to be just a little bit smaller than it is, but I want to align it up over the center of the document and just where the circles touch. As soon as I get it in position, I'm just going to let go of the mouse button. Now if you didn't get yours aligned perfectly, this is what you're going to do. You're going to select the shape and up here, you have some alignment options, but if you aren't able to see those, you'll need to be selecting a Shape tool. Because if you select the Move tool, they're just not available. So you want them to be selecting a Shape tool when you're working with shapes. Then you'll click here and select Align to Canvas and then you'll choose Horizontal centers and Vertical centers and this square, which is the one that you had selected, will now be centered on the canvas. Next up, we're going to turn off these two circles. So these are the ones in the middle. We're going to focus on our rectangle and our two ellipses. I'm going to click on the Rectangle, control click on the first ellipse and control click on the second ellipse. I've got all those three shapes selected. I'll right click and choose Merge shapes. Now I have one shape where previously I had three. I'm going to turn back on this ellipse here. I'm going to select it, I'm going to choose Edit, Copy. I'm going back to this rectangle up here, and I'm going to choose Edit, Paste. From this drop-down list here, I'm going to select, Subtract front shape. If I go to the Paths palette here, you'll see that what we did was we just subtracted the red shape from the black one. Now that we've done that, let's go back and get the other circle, the other ellipse. So that's one here. I'm going to choose Edit, Copy. I'm going back to my top ellipse here, and I'm going to choose Edit, Paste. From the drop-down list here, I'm going to select, Subtract front shape. You'll see here that exactly what we want to happen is happening we're carving out this shape from our original shape. Now we can turn off the ellipse. Now we've got the basic shapes that we want here right now but there's a lot of paths that are sitting around, not looking too good. You can see them also in the Paths pallet. What you'll need to do now is to go to the Paths selection tool and select over all of these paths. Up here on the toolbar you've got a little icon here and it's already set to combine shapes. What you want to do is not touch anything else, but just go straight to Merge shape components. What that does is it gets rid of all the paths that you didn't want, leaving only the path that you did want. So we've now got a metaball shape. What we need to do is just convert it into a custom shape that we can use any time in Photoshop. To do that, we're going to choose Edit and Define custom shape. We're just going to call this metaball, and click Okay. Now you don't need this shape any longer. You don't need the document, you don't need the shape. Because permanently now in your Shapes collection, is your metaball shape. We're ready to go ahead and use it to make some patterns. 3. Pt 2 - Multicolor Metaball Pattern: Now that you've created your actual measurable shape, it's time to use your metabolic to make a pattern or two. I'm going to start by choosing File and then New. I'm going to start with a document that is just 400 pixels by 400 pixels in size, 72 pixels resolution, RGB color mode, white, and I'm using the SRGB color space. I'll click "Create." I'm going to zoom in so that I can seen this a little bit more clearly. I'm going to add some guides just to make it a little bit easier. I'm going to create guides at 25 percent, 50, and 75 percent, both vertical and horizontal. Now I'm going to create my metabolic shapes. I'm going to custom shapes and my metal bawl shape in later versions of Photoshop will already be selected, in earlier versions, you'll just want to go to the very last shape in your shape collection. I'm going to just drag out a shape and I'm going to hold the Shift key to constrain its proportions. I want it to be about this size, a little bit into the 25 percent area and over the 75 percent area. I'm going to select this shape and I'm going to line its center just over the intersection of these two guides. Now, it doesn't have to be a 100 percent accurate, but it needs to be relatively so. I'm going to click to open my layers palette and just open it up so I can see what I'm doing. I'm going to make a duplicate of this shapes, so I'm going to drag it onto the new layer icon. I'm going back to the shape tool and I'm going to color it a different color. In this case, I'm going to use the blue color. Now I'm going to the move tool, I'm going to move it out of the way, and I'm going to rotate it around. I'm going to position it also with its midpoint just about either this intersection here, and I'm going to click the check mark. I'm going to go to this shape again and make another copy of it. I'm going to recolor it with a different color. I'm going to choose orange color this time, and I'm going to the move tool. That's going to move it so its midpoint is about over the edge of the document and aligned to this guide here. I want one more shape down here, so I'm going to go to this one because it needs to be in the same orientation. Going to make a duplicate of it, I'm going to recolor this shape and use a yellow color for it. Back to the move tool, and I'm going to move it down into position here, lining up its midpoint just over this line here. Now I need to make some duplicates of the shapes so that everything is going to align perfectly when we go to make our pattern. I'm going to focus on this blue shape first. I'm going to select it and make a duplicate. My need to move this 400 pixels in this direction. So I'm going to choose Edit, Free transform. There's a trick to this, and I'm going to show you what it is. Now, this is going to be the furthest most x point for this shape. In this box of nine shapes here, I'm going two click on the furthest point. That lets me read off that there's further point is at 437 pixels. If I want to move this point 400 pixels in this direction, it's new point is going to be 400 pixels less than this. So it was 437, subtract 400, and you get 37. I'm just making sure this reads 37 and I'll click the check mark. That's in the exact correct position. Let's look at this orange shape, we're going to duplicate it. Now, it's lading point is into the document, so that's when we're going to be interested in. In this case, we're going to change the y-value. I'm going to choose Edit, Free transform. We're going to look at its y-value, at the moment, we're looking at the midpoint, but let's look at the front point here, the front middle one. The front middle one is a 137. We're going to add 400 to it to move it down. So 137 plus 400 is 537. I'll click the check mark. The 400 value is just coming from the dimensions of this document. It starts off paying 400 buy 400, so anything we move has to be moved 400 in any direction. The last shape is the shallow one here, and we need to make three copies of it so I'm going to just drag over three copies, because it needs to go here, here, here, and here. Let's go for the up here one first, so we're going to select this version of it. We're going to choose Edit, Free transform. Now, I need to subtract 400 from something in terms of the y-value. Well, at the moment the y-value reads 400.5 pixels, while if I subtract 400 from it, that's just going to read 0.5 pixels. The 0.5 is really critical, you don't want to drop that just because it's a really small value. Click the check mark. Now I'm going to move another copy and this one's going across in this direction, in the x direction, 400 pixels, Edit, Free transform. At the moment, its x value for the midpoint, and that's fine. I can measure it from the midpoint, is 99.50. Well, I have to add 400 to it so I'm going to read 499.50, and click the check mark. Now I'm going to take this last one and I'm going to move it this direction and this direction. Edit, Free transform. The y-value if I subtract 400 from it is going to be 0.50, and the x-value, I have to add 400 to it to move it across here, so I'm just going to put a four out the front here, and I'll click the check mark. Now, your starting values are going to be slightly different to mine, but you just need to be aware that this is the x direction and this is the y direction. If you're going across, you're going to add 400, if you're going the other way, you're going to subtract it. If you're going down, you're going to add 400, if you're coming back up, you're going to subtract 400. Really is as easy as that. Now we've got ad design, I'm going to choose, Select All, I'm going to chose Edit, Define pattern, and click "Okay". At this point, if you wanted to make changes to the colors, you're going to need to change each of these shapes. So everything that's blue would need to bee changed, or everything that's yellow needs to be changed. Because each of these colored pieces makes up a single shape later on. Let's see this pattern that work, File, New. I'm going to create a large document scrapbook paper size 3,600 by 3,600 pixels, 300 pixels per inch resolution, transparent background, RGB color, SRGB color mode. I'll click "Create." I'll choose New fill layer pattern, click "Okay". The design is filled automatically with the last pattern that we created, which is this pattern here. So it just looks wonderful, it's a really sophisticated little pattern for the work that we've done. Now because we've put so much effort into this pattern, you may want to save this file so that you could do some recoloring or you could do some other things with it, perhaps put circles inside these metabolic dots and you'll need the basic pattern to do that because you don't want to have to go through and recreate this pattern again. Another thing that you could do is deselect the background layer and make another version of it this way, because this would be then a transparent background pattern that you could put a solid fill behind or you could even put a gradient behind. So eye suggest you save this and make as many patterns out of it using it as a base as you like. 4. Pt 3 - Another Metaball Pattern and a Variation: While we're looking at making some metaball patterns, let's have a look at another one which is a little simpler but no less interesting. I'll choose File and then New. I'm going to go back to creating a 400 by 400 pixel document. It's just RGB color mode. I'll click "Create." I'm going to zoom in a little bit so I can see a little more clearly. I'm going to my custom shape tool. I'm going to make sure I have my metaball shape selected. We're still going to drag out a shape about this big. Now this one I want to be colored black. I'm just going to move it into this position. I don't have any guides for this is not necessary for this pattern, but you do want to shape that's about half the height of the document. I'm going to make a duplicate of this, and I'm going to rotate the duplicate around. Now, one of the nice things about metaball patterns is because they've got circles at either end, is that they'll overlap really nicely, and so they make some really interesting shapes. Now these two shapes, I'm going to right-click and Rasterize these layers, and I'm going to right-click and merge the layers. I've just got a single shape here. I'm going to make a duplicate of that shape because I'm going to need it in a minute. Now this top layer, which is the only one I have visible right now, I'm going to break up and cent to the corners of this document, so that's going to make a repeating pattern later on. For this, I'll choose Filter, Other, Offset. Now the secret with the Offset filter is that you're going to enter in the Horizontal area here a value that is half the width of your document. My document was 400 pixels wide, so I've typed 200. In the Vertical, you're going to enter a value that is half the height of the document. My document was 400 pixels tall, so half of that is 200, so that's as easy as it is to work out the values here. Now going to click "Wrap Around" and click "OK." There shapes when we create them as a repeating pattern, are all going to join together to make a single L-shaped metaball. I'm going to turn this one back on. This is the exact same shape as this one here, it would be much more interesting if it looked a little bit different, so what I'm going to do is just rotate it around. I'm going to place it about in that position and click the checked mark. Now at this point if I wanted to, I could re-color this shape. To do so because it's actually a rest shape now, I'm going to click on the lock icon here and that's going to lock the transparent pixels on this layer. If I have a color selected to use, so I'm going to make this a, well, let's make it a red color, if I have red selected here, I can now press Alt backspace option Delete on the Mac, and only the non-transparent pixels on this are actually going to be filled with the color, so now I can unlock it. Now, I don't want my background to come with me here, so I'm just going to turn it off. I'm going to select Select All as that will select everything that's visible here, but not the background and I'm going to make a pattern from it. Now let's go to our working document. I'm going to double-click on the Pattern Fill here, click on this option, and go and select the very last pattern. That's the one that I've just created. Now, to show you how it looks, I'm going to add a layer at the back here, just by control clicking on this icon. White is my background color, I'll press Control backspace Command Delete on the Mac. You can see that this creates a really interesting little pattern, taking advantage of this wonderful shape factor that we can get from the metaball shape. Metaballs can be connected to each other going in all directions if you want to make even more complex patterns from them. I want to go back briefly to this pattern here because I want to borrow the general concept for a variation to this pattern. Now to do this, I'm firstly going to go to this broken up shaped, the black one, and I'm going to trash it. I'm going back to this red shape here, I'm going to lock down the pixels on the shapes because I want to make them black. I'm going to go and get black as my foreground color there and I've locked a transparent pixels, so I can press Alt backspace option Delete on the Mac to fill the shape with black. Now I'm going to the fx icon and I'm going to click "Stroke" because I want to add a red stroke around my shape. Now I've already got that in place. I just selected a red color and I've got a size of about eight, but you can make whatever size you like, so I'm going to click "OK". Now at this stage, if we take this shape and try and break it up into the corners because it's got an effect applied to it, the whole thing is going to broken up in not a very good way. What I wanted to do is I want to right-click this shape and I want to rasterize it, so I'm rasterising the last style, so that the color surrounding the stroke is built into the shape so when I break up this shape in the corners, the stroke is going to be broken up correctly. I'm going to make a duplicate of that shape because I want you to work with both of them. I want to go to the topmost one and I want to send it to the corners just as I did that first pattern, Filter, Other, Offset. The Offset filter is just defaulting to the exact settings I used before, so I'm just going to click "OK." Now I'm going back to this shape and the one in the middle here, I'm just going to rotate around. I'm holding the Shift key as I do it so that it's constrained to a rotation of 90 degrees. I'm just going to position it roughly in position here, so I've got it nicely in relation to the other shapes. Going to turn off the Background layer, I'm going to choose Select All and I'm going to choose to make a pattern from this. Now having done that, let's go back to foundation document, double-click here, and let's go and apply our new pattern to it. I'm going to click "OK." Now this pattern was transparent, so we can see through it, we're seeing white behind it, because we added a white fill blur here, but you can also get really amazing results if you replace this with a gradient. I'm going to choose Layer, New Fill Layer, Gradient and click "OK." The Gradient layer is going in between these two Gradient layer that we're seeing. At the moment, my fill colors are black and white, so my default gradient is a foreground to background gradient, and it just looks fantastic. This is a really nice option, but there's another one I want to show you. I'm just going to click on The Gradient Tool here. If you don't see all those gradients, you can get more by clicking the Gear icon, select one or more of these where you need to come and do them individually and when you click on them, you can just click to append them to the group. But I've got the ones that I want visible here, so I'm just going to show you some of the effects that you can get with these gradients. Some of them look really, really good against this pattern. But this is the one I really like. Anything that has a really dark color to it looks really fantastic on this shape. Just going to adjust this slider here so I get darker a little bit further through the document, but you can see that you're almost losing the red up here, but when it's contrasted against the purply blue, looks really fantastic. You may want to experiment with some of these gradients and just see how the colors in the gradient play against the colors in your pattern to get some really interesting results. I encourage you to play with this metaball shape, you can do lots of things with it, including layering it on top of itself to make more complex shapes from which you can make your patterns. 5. Pt 4 - Make an Organic Metaball shape: Up until now, the metaball that we've been using is a really regular shape. Now, we're going to look at a little bit more of a organic shape that we can create. I'm going to choose "File" and then "New". I'm creating a document 400 pixels by 400 pixels in size. It is a white background and RGB color mode, sRGB color space. I'll click "Create" and I press "Control" or "Command 0" just size it up so that I can see what I'm doing. In the Layers palette, I want to make sure that I'm working on a brand new layer. I'm going to click to create a new layer. I'm going to the Elliptical Marquee tool. I'm just going to drag out a smallish circle and fill it with my black by pressing "Alt" "Backspace" option, "Delete" on the Mac. Now, at this point I need to deselect my selection with Select, Deselect, or Control, or Command D. I'm going to convert this to a Smart Object. I'm going to choose "Filter", "Convert for Smart Filters", and click "Okay". The reason for this is I want to be able to come back and edit this in case the filter that I'm about to apply is not enough or is too much. I'm going to choose "Filter", "Blur", "Gaussian Blur". Gaussian blur is really nice blur for really blurring everything in a selection, and right now we've got our layer selected, so things are getting blurred really nicely. The amount of the blur is going to control how the effect is applied. At this stage, we want to pretty fuzzy look to our shapes, so I've got it set to about 22. I'm going to click "Okay". Now, I'm going to make a duplicate of this layer, so I'm going to drag and drop it on to the New Layer icon. I'm going to move this second one away from the first. Now, it will help you as you're working with this particular project, if you have Auto-Select enabled. So when you've got the Move tool selected, Auto-Select is enabled, that's going to let you move things around a little more easy. Now, I've got my two shapes created, I'm going to add a couple of adjustment layers. I'm going to click the topmost layer and choose "Layer", "New Adjustment Layer", and in this instance, I'm going to click "Posterize" and click "Okay". Now, posterize is an adjustment layer that simplifies and image, and right now, we've got it down to four levels. In other words, four colors in our image. I'm just going to increase this a little bit to five or six. We can see that we're getting an interesting effect around the shapes that we have, because what's happening is that our fuzzy gray areas are turning into levels of gray. We've got different levels of gray and a whole series of them in the image. Now, If I go back to the image at this stage and go back to the Move tool, you'll see that as I move this around, we've got a fluid change happening, so I can restructure what my shapes look like by just moving them around relative to each other. But you want to make sure that when you add your blur to your circle, that your circle is way inside the document. You don't want it to be too close to any of the edges that you will get a clipped off, because you want this full range of nice effect happening around the edge of your shape. Now, because we've got different levels of gray, if we want to add color to them, we can do that with what's called a gradient map, because what gradient map does is it maps a gradient of colors to varying colors in the image. Because we've got really distinct areas of gray in our image now, a gradient is going to be applied as solid colors rather than a gradient. It's going to have the effect of bands of colors. With the topmost layer selected, I'm going to choose "Layer", "New Adjustment Layer", I'm going to apply a gradient map to this image, and click "Okay". The default gradient is a black to white, but I don't want that, so I'm going to open up my panel and I'm going to select one of these gradients. If you don't see this full set of gradients, click the down pointing arrow here beside your gear icon, and there are a whole lot of gradient sets that you can select here. If you select one, for example, pastels, make sure that you select Append and not Okay or Cancel because you want to add it to your gradient collection, you don't want to replace it. Now, I've got a pretty good set here. I'm just going to start clicking on one of them. You can see immediately that the gradient, even though this is a really nice gradient that's softly transitioning from one color to the other when it's applied to this image with the posterize effect applied to it, we're actually getting bands of color. You can go ahead and select any of these gradients to see what kind of effect it's having on your image. I'm going to choose a fairly colorful gradient. Well, probably this one here. I'm going to click "Okay". Now, because of the way that we've created this document, it's pretty much editable. For example, I can click on the "Posterize" icon here and open up the Posterize panel, and I can add more or less bands of color to my shapes by increasing or decreasing the levels. I can double-click on the Gradient Map and change the gradient that I have applied to the image. Now, either I can select another gradient or I could come in here, and I could add some additional stops, for example. We've got two shapes that are the foundation of this pattern, but there's nothing to stop us from taking one of these shapes, and dropping it onto the New Layer icon. Because we've laid two shapes on top of each other, two identical shapes on top of each other, and because they're partially transparent, the grays have been added to each other, so we're getting a slightly different banding here. We could leave the shape where it is to get this effect or we could do something like this, and we can pull the shapes apart, and when we do, the interaction of the bands of gray around these shapes with the gradient map over the top is making a change to our design. So we can grab any of these shapes and move them around. Now, a typical metaball pattern is a three layered pattern. What we could do is we can put the shapes in next to each other down here and center one over the top, and that's a different sort of metaball pattern. If you create a design like this that you like, let's go ahead now and see how we would turn this into a repeating pattern in Photoshop. 6. Pt 5 - Organic Metaball Pattern: To turn these metal balls into a pattern, the first thing that we're going to need to do is to actually make a stamp layer. A stamp layer is a copy of all of the layers below flattened into a single layer. Don't want to lose all these layers, but I do need a stamp version because the look of this document right now is the accumulation of all of these layers. I need a copy of it so I can do something with it. I'm going to hold down, Ctrl Alt Shift, that Command Option Shift on the Mac and press the letter E. That gives me a layer that is a flattened version of the image. Now, at this stage I'm going to turn off all the layers below. The document that I'm working on is 400 pixels by 400 pixels in size, so we can create this as a pattern by breaking this shape up. We're going to do that using the offset filter. So choose Filter, Other, Offset, and the only thing you have to know about the offset filter is that you just put in here a value that is equal to half of the document width and height, the documents square. We're going to put 200 in horizontal and vertical. Select Wrap Around and then click, "Okay". So now what we've done is we've thrown this shape that we had into the corners, and this is going to allow us to create a repeating pattern swatch from this. But I'd also like something to go in the middle, so I'm going to turn that off for a minute. I'm going back to my metabolic pattern, and I'm going to make a few changes to it. I'm just going to go to this layer, and I'm going to move these things around a little bit, so I get a different version of the pattern for the middle of my swatch. I can also resize this side. I've got my transform handles here and as soon as I start to resize it, Photoshop says, "I need to turn everything off while you're resizing it". So just go, "Okay", and you're just going to Resize It. I'm holding the Shift key to constrain its proportions and I'm clicking the check mark. Now when it comes back, it still has all of these effects applied to it. I'm actually going to make three different sizes shapes here. I'm going take this one and I'm going to enlarge it a little bit. But I could also make an oval shape if I wanted to. You can do all sorts of things with these. I'm going to put those there, we're going to do a rough check on the original pattern to see if this is going to fit in the middle. I'm not sure that it is, but let's see if we can get it to do that. Now I've got this set of shapes. I'm going to click on the topmost layer, press Ctrl Alt Shift A, Command Option Shift A, on the Mac, and I'm going to turn everything off. So now I've got two layers. I've got the outer edge of my patent and the middle one. I'm going to move the middle up on top of the outer one. What I need to do right now is to get read of this band of color, and that's pretty easily done. I'm just going to click once with the Magic Wand tool on this color band. I have tolerant set to five, it can be set to a really low value, and I have contiguous enabled, and that's just made a really quick selection of that band of color. I'm just going to press "Delete". Now I can see my pattern pace in position, and it's not quite in the right position, so I'm just going to drag it into position. Now at this point, I could do one of a couple of things. I could try and place this element in position so that there was this dark red all the way around it, or I could try and blend the two paces in together where they intersect. So I've got some red here that is exactly the same red as the shape underneath, and the same thing happening here. I think I like that effect a little bit better. What I'm going to do is just enlarge this and position it so that the colors are running into each other, and just going to click the check mark. Now I have this really interesting pattern. I'm going to choose, Select and All. I'm going to choose Edit, Define Pattern, I'm going to call this organic, and we're going to create a brand new document for it. I'm going to create this as scrapbook size, so that would be 3,600 pixels by 3,600 pixels, 300 pixels per inch, RGB color mode. It doesn't matter whether it's transparent or not, is RGB color, click "Create", and then Layer, New Fill Layer, Pattern, click, "Okay", and it's now filled with the pattern that we just created. Of course, the pattern is not fixed in stone because we could go back and do something different with it. Right now what I'm thinking is I'd like a dot just in this area here. Well, I'm going to turn off these two objects. I'm going to turn everything else back on. Now it's the interaction of everything against this white background that's giving us the banding, so you don't want to turn the white background off or you don't have anything at all. But you can turn off some of these shapes, so you could just have one shape. Going back to the selection tool, I'm just going to select on this line, I'm going to press Ctrl D to deselect the current selection so that I can actually work with this layer. I'm going to make a slightly oval shaped this time. Now, I think it's going to be in this position in the pattern, but it doesn't really matter where it is because I can move it. Going to the topmost visible layer, Ctrl Alt Shift A, turn everything else off. Put this up on the very top, make my patent layers visible, and I want to get rid of this pink area again, so I'm going to the top layer, select over the pink and press "Delete". Here is the additional shape I have for my pattern. Right now, a whole or more is selected then I want, so I'll press Ctrl or Command D to deselect it, and now I can move this shape into position. Now, if I want it to appear here in my pattern, I'm going to have to be really careful with it. Because it falls over the edge of the pattern here, I need it in two places; I need it over here, and I need it over here. So I'm going to take a duplicate of this layer. This top version, I'm going to move 400 pixels across, so I'll choose Edit, Free Transform. Right now, the x value for the middle of this shape is at 30. I wanted to just move it all the way across here, 400 pixels, so I'm going to type 430, and I'm going to click the check mark. What this is going to ensure is that these piece and these piece are going to line up in the final pattern. So I'm going to choose Select All, and I'm going to make a pattern out of this, and I'll call this organic 2. Let's go back to master document and apply organic 2 here. You can see that we can build up this pattern with this really interesting measurable effect, and of course, like every other pattern that can be easily recovered by adding an adjustment layer, Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Hue Saturation, click "Okay". We can just walk the colors around in this image to get a different color mix. You can reduce the saturation as well if you want something a little bit more gray scale. If you're not getting quite enough visible detail out of the pattern at this stage, go back to the patent layer itself and choose Layer, New Adjustment layer, Curves. Now what a curves adjustment lets you do is it allows you to alter the range of tones in the image. Now, that might seem a little bit confusing, but let's have a look and say what happens when we dragged down on this end of the curve. What we're doing is we're darkening the darker areas of the image. So where this patent is dark, it's getting darker because these are the darkest pixels in the image over this side, and over this side are the lightest pixels in the image. If we drag up on the curve, we're going to lighten them. The lights are getting lighter and the darks are getting darker, so we're getting a bigger tonal range. To save the before and after, I'm just going to click here. This is the before. It's a little bit lacking in contrast, if you like, and here's the after, it's brighter, there's more definition in the colors. You can play around with the tone curve, you can do all sorts of things with it. You can even break it like this and drag down. I just encourage you to play around with the curve here because you can't damage the image. You can always just press the delete key to go back and start again. But you might find some interesting things happen when you work with the curves. The more you practice with it, the more you're going to get used to what it can do to an image. But this S-curve, in this case, it's a really, really deep S-shaped curve, will help you bring a bit more contrast and Christmas into the image. So there's a way of applying your new metabolic pattern to a document but also enhancing it, so it goes from the original, through a brightening process with the curves, and into a color change using hue saturation. 7. Project and Wrapup: Your project for this class will be to create one or both of the metaball shapes that you've seen created here. Then use the shape or shapes to create a pattern. Post an image of your completed pattern or patterns in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and I hope that you've learned heaps and heaps about working with Photoshop. Now as you're watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up and secondly, write in just a few words why you're enjoying this class. These recommendations help other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and I 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. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon. 8. Extra Instructions for Photoshop CS5 and earlier: The process of creating the Metaball pattern in earlier versions of Photoshop is a little different just simply because the versions are different. I'm working in CS5 here. I'll choose File, New, I'm going to create a document 400 by 400 pixels in size, RGB color white. I'm going to click "OK". Now I'm going to put some guides in just in case the guides don't work, so you'll choose View, New Guide. Going to put one at 50 percent horizontal and then you'll put one at 50 percent vertical or vice versa. It doesn't really matter what order you put them in, just type 50 percent. I'm going to press "Control" or "Command 0" to zoom back out. Going to the ellipse tools, I'm going to select that. You want to click this down pointing arrow here and make sure that the ellipse is set to unconstrained. You want the stile here, set to this no stroke and you want a color, just black is fine. You're going to drag out a circle holding the shift key as you do. It wants to be less than half the size of this document, so you want to fit it in here really nicely, and it wants to butt up against both of the guides that you've just created. In the last panel, I'm going to make a duplicate of this shape and then I'm going to drag the topmost one across so that it butts up to the other one. You can select both of them, drag them onto the new layer icon, just drag down and again, make sure that these next two circles are buttered up to the guides that you've just created. Now you can click the topmost one, shift click on the bottom, and making sure that show transform controls is visible. You can just rotate them, hold the shift key as you rotate them so that you can get them to rotate around 45 degrees. Click the check mark. Next we're going to the rectangle tool, and we want to draw a rectangle in this area. It's going to be easier probably if you change colors at this stage just so you can see what you're doing. So I'm just going to start drawing my rectangle. I'm going to hold the shift key as I do to constrain it to a perfect square and I'm looking for it to intersect roughly where the circles themselves are intersecting. Now, if I don't get it centered perfectly, I'm not really worried because I can go back to the shape and then just move it around to make sure that it centered perfectly over those guides. Now we're ready to do the math with our shapes, so the first thing you're going to do is turn off these two side shapes. Just click on the layer visibility thumbnail so you can't seen them. We're going to focus on these three shapes am putting them together. Firstly, we're going to the square shape and we're just going to click on the layer mask here. This is a vector mask here, and you want to see the little markings around the edge which tell you that you're focused on that particular shape. You're going to press "Control C", that's command C on a Mac and you're copying that shape to the clipboard, go down and click on this mask. So you want to say this second layer with its little markings around it and you're going to press "Control or Command V". The upshot is you should see the two shapes in this mask. If you don't say that, then you're going to have to go back and start over again on this process. Then you'll go to the past selection tool here, select over these two shapes and up here on the toolbar you should see the option to combine them. You're just going to click to combine them and you'll see now that you have this combined shapes so you can turn the topmost shape off because you don't need that any longer. Now, that we've combined the square and this bottom shape, we want to combine what we've got now with the top shape. Again, we're going to click on this side thumbnail. We are going to make sure that before you do anything that it is selected, it's got this little markings around it. Press "Control or Command C", go down to this shape here, which is the one we want to add it to make sure that the mask is selected. It's got that little bounding box and press "Control or Command V". Again, you should see the combination shape appear in this mask. Now if you don't see it, start all over again with just this step. Go back to the path selection tool, select over the entire shape as it is now, and click "Combine". Now you should have this shape down here and you can turn off this other one because you don't need it any longer. We're just going to focus on putting this shape together. We're going back to one of these circles. I'm going to select it, I'm selecting its mask, and I'm going to press "Control or Command C" to copy it shape. I'm going to turn the visibility off right now because it's going to be a little confusing otherwise to see what's going on. I'm going down to my combined shape here, make sure the mask is selected, press "Control or Command V". Now this time we want to do something different than adding the shape together. We want to select this second icon here, which is subtract, and you'll see that this is already knocked out the middle of this shape, but what we need to do now is to click combine and that permanently knocks out that pace. Let's go back to the last circle that we have to take out. Click on the vector layer mask here, press "Control or Command C" to copy it, turn it off so you can see what's going on. Click on this mask here, make sure it's got that little box surrounded, press "Control or Command V" to paste it in. As you can see, it's not looking right yet because we've got a select this second icon in here because we have to subtract from the shape area in this case. You'll see in here that you've got the exact correct shape, but with an extra path, this shape looks perfect. Go to combine and there is your shape. Now we've got a shape that we can use, the only problem is that when we go to edit, we can't define a custom shape at this point. Let's open up the past palette and you'll see that for this shape, we actually have a vector mask. With the past palette visible, if you click on this shape on vector mask or whatever it reads, just go to edit and now you'll say that define custom shape is selectable, because now you're telling photoshop, "Don't look at the vector mask, in actual fact go and look at the path that is in there, because that's what I want my shape to be," and we're just going to call this mutable and click "OK". Now you've done all you need to do. You don't need this shape any longer because the Metaball custom shape is built into Photoshop and so you can go ahead as we have in the video for CS6 and later, and just continue to make your Metaball patterns.