Paint to Patterns in Adobe Photoshop

1. Introduction: Panels are all around us. Just have a look at the stuff around you. Maybe it's pillows, bedsheets, wallpapers, notebooks, months, and whatnot. We often overlook the fact that someone might have created this beautiful repeating patterns. The factors, great creative minds like yours and mine are all behind this beauty. Creating repeating patterns is one of the most interesting parts of my career. I love painting with watercolor and gouache, and then I turn them into beautiful repeating patterns using Photoshop. Hi, my name is Michelle. I'm an illustrator and surface pattern designer and an educator. In this class, I will walk you through the magic of turning your hand painted florals, blobs, or whatever it read on paper into beautiful repeating patterns using Adobe Photoshop, the process is very simple and fun. All it takes is just a willingness to say yes to your creativity and get started. Adobe recently came up with very new tools in Photoshop, which we will be using to create the patterns. But if you're using an older version of Photoshop, not to worry. I've also covered the traditional way of creating pattern in Photoshop without any hassle. So it's a win-win for this class is perfect for anyone who wants to learn how to use Photoshop to create patterns, whether you are a beginner or experienced, all you need to take this class is a computer, adobe Photoshop, and some old or new artwork that you've created. If you don't have Adobe Photoshop, not to worry, you can access the seven-day free trial using the link that I've provided in the description of this class. So are you ready to get started next to it? 2. Class Project: Your project for this class is to use the tips and techniques. I'm going to share the clouds and then create your own repeat pattern using Adobe Photoshop. For practice, you can start with the motifs provided in the resources tab in case you don't have any artwork to start with. But please do note that these motifs are provided only for the purpose of creating a project for this class. If you are going to use your own motifs, that's even better. You can share as many patterns as you would like to. This is a quick guide on how to share your project for the class. So when you go to the class under the video, you will see these terms. All you have to do is go to the last tab that says Project and Resources, and then click on this green button that says Create Project. Now, I believe that you can not upload a project when you are using the Skillshare app on a phone or a tablet. So you will have to go to a browser for this purpose. Then you can add the cover image, the project title, and the description for your project. Just make sure to add the cover image so that anyone can easily find the thumbnail of your project in the project gallery. In the next lesson, I will show you how to scan your artwork and make it ready for creating patterns. 3. Scanning Artwork: Here is the scanner settings here and I'm just going to go through quickly go through what I use and what I don't. You can see that it's smaller size than compared to the scanner bed. You can use this marquee tool and just mark down the area that you want a scanned version of, let's say. And here you can make the changes now, documents sources, of course, the scanner glass and document type is reflective. So this is the scanner which I am using. Your scanner may have a different option that you need to just check. Another thing that you need to check as it is in the photo mode, not in the document mode though. Document mode is for simple text document. Basically, we don't really need it here. Just go back to the photo mode and select Preview. Preview is always helpful in getting a better idea of how your work looks like when it is scanned. Always use this function when, whenever you are scanning your artwork, the resolution here, I will be using 300 DPI. You can go above that. As I mentioned earlier, 300 is the standard, so we'll just go ahead and scan. Now before hitting scan, another important thing that you need to take care of is the file type or format. I usually use tiff format, which is a lossless format, as compared to a JPEG, which I beg, Which is the most commonly used unknown format. But the problem with JPEG is that when you open and close the file, many times, it tends to lose the image quality. So diff is a lossless file and it lasts forever basically. So try to use the format if you can. Now I'll just save the file on the desktop and hit Scan. We have our scan file ready. Now it's time to open Photoshop. I'll show you how to open this file in Photoshop. Just so you know, photoshop provides a number of ways to just perform one single function. So open a file or image in Photoshop, you can select this Open button right here on the left-hand side. Or you can go to file and then hit Open. Now you can also use the keyboard shortcut Command O for Mac users or Control O for PC users. Another way to open a file is to use this option right here in the middle of the screen. You can also drag and drop a file directly here, right here. You can open one file in so many ways in Photoshop tools, the one that you like the most. In the next lesson, I will show how we can clean up the artwork and do some color adjustments if needed. See you there. 4. Adjusting Colors: Now we will clean up the background and do some adjustments to the colors. First thing what I'll do is I'll unlock this layer and then we'll play with some adjustments. To be honest, I am quite happy with how the colors came out and this particular scan. It will try to reduce a little bit of saturation. And for that, I will open the adjustments panel. There are two ways to make the adjustments to the colors. I'll show you both and I'll talk about which one is better and how they're different from each other. For the first type of adjustment, you can go to the window. And in this drop-down menu, you will see this option called adjustments. When you click on this, you will get this panel right on the screen. And you can hold it. And if you want, you can stick it under the Layers panel by holding it right below the Layers menu. Until you see this blue line, you can move them around and they will be stuck together. So now we can work on some color adjustments. I want to do is show you the difference between this kind of adjustment and the second way of changing the colors, which I avoid doing. And I will show you why I do that. Let's talk about this 1 first. When you click on any adjustment option, let's say we want to change some brightness. I double-click on brightness and you will see that you will get another panel to make the property changes. Now, if you look closely, you will see that when I clicked on brightness and contrast option, it creates a new layer by itself or that particular property adjustment, which means that any changes that you make, largely made on the original artwork layer, this helps a lot and making any changes later, even if you want to make any single adjustment and you simply want to change anything later, you can simply go ahead and hide or even delete that adjustment layer without really affecting the original artwork. On the other hand, there is another way of making such changes and that is by going to the option image on top, that adjustments and selecting any adjustment that you want to do. Let's say again, we'll select brightness and contrast here. You can see that when I'm making these changes here using this panel, we don't see any separate layer for the changes. Let's say I change the brightness and then I changed saturation and color balance and many other changes. And now after some time for some reason, I feel that I want to get rid of the saturation changes. Let's say in that case it becomes really impossible to go back and do that particular change or undoing one particular adjustment. So that is why I always prefer using this panel to make the color adjustments to my work. All right, so coming back to the adjustments now, I'll use this pattern over here. And honestly speaking, I'm really happy with how the scan version came out, but I think there is a little room to make a little adjustment in the saturation because I feel that the flowers are looking a little more saturated, which I really don't like. So I'll just click on the Saturation Hue Saturation option. Selected the wrong option. I selected the color balance. I'm sorry, I'll just remove this so you can see that it's so easy or we can just undo any changes that we made. So I'll just go to hue and saturation panel and reduce the saturation a little bit and see how it looks. It looks pretty good. Let's just try changing the brightness and contrast. Let's see how it works. I think it's looking really nice now. I think I'll leave it like that. Now I need to remove the background. But before that, what I want to do is I want to merge these changes with my original layer. Now just to avoid any mistakes or any accidents in future, what I always do is I create a duplicate layer of the original layer. I can just simply drag this original layer and drag it to this plus icon, the layers panel. It will create a new Duplicate Layer, and then I will hide one of those layers and lock it. So this is just a backup layer in case I mess up things later after I've marched all the changes to my copy layer. So we always have a backup. We can come back and make those changes. Now it's time to merge these three layers so that we have one layer with all the adjustments, with permanent changes. There are two ways that you can merge the layers. When we do merge the layers is by selecting all the layers and then right-clicking on the screen and you will get an option. They're saying merge layers, and you can merge the layers. Another way is using the keyboard shortcut. The keyboard shortcut for merging the layers is Command E for Mac users and Control E for PC users. So this is how we merge the layers. Now we have the permanent changes done on this particular layer. In the next video, I will show you how you can use different tools to remove the white background from your artwork and separate out the elements to create beautiful pattern. 5. Remove background with Magic Wand Tool: The last video, we adjusted the colors of our artwork. Now it's time to clean up the background. There are many ways to remove the background in Photoshop. I'm going to show you the three ways that I have used a lot in my workflow, and we'll show you how each of these tools work. So the first tool that I'll show you is the magic wand tool. This tool works best when your artwork has very defined edges and good contrasts between the artwork and the background. Sometimes watercolor papers have very pronounced texture, which makes it a little difficult for the magic wand to work effectively. When you zoom in very close, you can see some texture of the paper right here. With watercolors, especially the edges meet tend to be very light, which makes it a little difficult to make the selection with Magic Wand tool. But still, I will show you how to use this tool, since this can be a very quick and easy way of removing background if your artwork is not very light and has defined edges like with gouache paints as compared to the watercolors. To select the Magic Wand tool, you can go to the toolbar on the left and select this one right here. The keyboard shortcut for this tool is w. Now once you have selected the magic wand tool, one thing that you need to check is the tolerance on the top bar right here. Tolerance is basically the intensity or the power with which the tool will make the selection of a particular color that you have clicked on. Here you can see the tolerance is 90 at the moment, which is pretty high. If we keep it at 90, let's say. And click on the white background, you will see that it has selected pretty much every bit of the white that was touching that particular pixel that I had clicked on. Now you would wonder why it has just selected only this area of the white and left the whole paper background like that. That is because if you notice closely, this white area is enclosed by the flowers and it's kind of separated from the other part of the paper background. Let's just make our selection here. So if I zoom in very closely, you can see that having tolerance at 90, it has selected a lot of colored areas as well. You can see the edges of the flowers and the leaves are also selected. We need to reduce the tolerance a bit. Maybe I'll keep it around 25, which works very nicely. Sometimes you can see closely, it does not selected the green and pink. But you can see that there are many spikes around here which are not selected. This is why sometimes magic wand tool, it can become a little tricky option. Let's just move to change the tolerance to 50 and it see what happens. Now. It has done a pretty good job right here. You can see it is still selected some of the green, but I think we can go down here, we can see that has selected some of the pinks. Let's go beyond. You can see that I'm just trying to play around and find out the best way we can select the whites without removing our artwork. I'm pretty happy with the selection over here. Now, I have to select this one also, so I'll hold the Shift key. And now when I hold the Shift key, you can see that we are getting a plus sign just right below the magic wand. I'd hit this one. You can see it has gone very nice job. We're here. Now we have to look for more areas which we need to be selected. I think it has selected almost everything over here. Normally what I do when my selection is good and I'm happy with it. I normally go and hit delete. So I'll just hit delete. Now to de-select all the selections. You can see, I'm going over here. You can select Command D or Control D. But the thing is with this transparent background, we can not really check whether the selection has been done nicely. So what I'm going to do is I'll create new layer. I'll drop it down beneath this adjusted layer. And I always use a darker color. So let's use a black color. And using the paint bucket tool. This is the paint bucket tool. You can use G as the keyboard shortcut and fill it in. We have this layer working as a helper for understanding how clean our background is. Now looking closely, you can see that the edges did not come out as we would ever expect our artwork to look like. This is why I don't really prefer using magic wand tool with watercolor paintings, especially as it can be really challenging to get clean and nice edges of your clean artwork. Magic Wand Tool works perfectly if your artwork has consistent edges like we get with gouache paint and even acrylic paint. Now, I will show you another tool which I used as an alternative to magic wand tool, which is called Magic Eraser tool. In the next video. 6. Remove background with Magic Eraser Tool: Now I'm going to talk about Magic Eraser Tools. Magic Eraser Tool works somewhere like magic wand tool, but it does a much better job than Magic Wand Tool. To open Magic Eraser tool. You can go to eraser from their flyout menu. Here you can see Magic Eraser tool. Now here we have magic eraser tool. You can change the tolerance if required, but we'll just go with 50 right here and hit anywhere on the white area. And again, I'll just create one layer with dark background like this. Now, you can see that it has done a pretty good job at selecting most of the white area without leaving any extra aspects like we got with Magic Wand tool in the previous video. If you want, you can claim this area, this white section. But I usually prefer to keep it like that only. You can always try to play around with the tolerance and see what works best for you. Sometimes magic wand tool is enough and works best if your artwork has defined edges. And Magic Eraser Tool works better. In other cases, you just need to figure out which tool will work best for your artwork. My point of showing you these two tools in this class was if you have older versions of Photoshop, then these tools come in handy in cleaning up the artwork. Now, I will show you how you can get rid of all the extra pixels that are left in the background, as you can see here, how to separate each element and place them on separate layers. 7. Clean Up and Preparing Motifs: Now we have removed the white background. There are many things that we need to clean up. As you can see on the screen, that we have these tiny particles over here and we don't want to use them. Of course. What I'm gonna do is here. This method works both in the case if you're using magic wand or Magic Eraser tool. So this is the next step after these, after using these two tools, what I do is usually I use Lasso Tool. Lasso tool is this one right here, which looks like a lasso and the keyboard shortcut for it is l. Had this one. What exactly this tool does is you can just create a selection freehand like so. To deselect any area, you can simply hit Command D or Control D on your computer. Now one thing to note here is that you may see that many of the elements are actually touching each other like here you can see these two flowers are touching each other. We need to be little careful while making the selection. So let's start with this flower first. In this case, I'm going to select this flower plus these two leaves and make it as a one single element or motif you can call start from here. Sometimes using a mouse can be a little tricky. So now I have reached to a point where I cannot move my hand to make it easier. What I usually do, you can do is you can press the Spacebar on the keyboard and then you can move the canvas any way, anywhere as you like. And then again, being careful for zooming in, you can use command plus or control plus. Being very careful on the edges so that I get, I do not take away any other element. Now here I just have to randomly create a shape, something like this. You don't have to be very precise with that. And I'm just using the space bar to move around easily. Alright. Now we have the selection, we need to separate it out from this layer adjusted layer. Again, there are many ways to do it. Either you can just copy and paste or you can cut and paste as you like. I normally do cut and paste so that it becomes less overwhelming when I'm cleaning up this layer. So in order to cut and paste the selection just hit Command Shift J if you're using a Mac or Control Shift J, if you're using a PC. Using this command, it will cut and paste a selected item on a separate layer, as you can see right here. Now what I'll do is I'll just hide the original layer and zoom in on this new layer just to see what we got here. You can see that we got the flower as a separate motif, but we can still see many spikes around which we need to clean up. For that. What you can do is you can zoom in as much as you can. And now I'm going to use the eraser tool. You can hit a on your keyboard or just selected from the toolbar and adjusting the size of the eraser. To adjust the size, you can use the square brackets on your keyboard. The opening bracket is to reduce the size of the eraser brush. And you can use the closing square bracket to increase the size of the eraser. Now I'm just carefully looking at all the extra specs and pixels that we don't need, and just using the eraser to remove those extra bits. This process takes a little while and just make sure that the opacity is a 100%. Because you don't want to leave anything behind. Just going very carefully over here and removing whatever. I think, not just removing some of the whites from here. Here I think I can use the magic wand tool just to remove this magic eraser tool will work perfect. I would leave this white as it is because I think that will look better. No, selecting the normal eraser and cleaning up all the extra pixels like so. Doing this with a mouse can be a little tricky if you're just new to doing using Photoshop or Illustrator on PC or Mac. But if you just do some practice, it will become a little easier. As I told you earlier, I'm just dragging the screen using the Shift key. So whenever I have to move the screen, I'm just using the Shift key. And wherever I wanted to remove the white, I'm just using the Magic Eraser tool. Whenever required. Just undo this little mark. I have also provided a guide to the keyboard shortcuts and resources tab for your reference in case you need them later. This motif looks good. I'll rename this layer to let say flower one. That's it. This is how we clean up and plays all the motifs on their own layers. We just learned how to use magic wand and Magic Eraser tool to clean up the backgrounds and separate out the motifs on their own layers. Now in the next video, I will talk about a new tool which was introduced in Photoshop CC 2020 version, which is called Object Selection tool. If you're using the Photoshop CC 2020 or above, then you don't want to miss the next lesson because it will save a lot of time that we had to spend on the traditional tools we just discussed. 8. Object Selection Tool: In this video, we're going to talk about how the object selection tool works. The stool was introduced in 2020 in Photoshop. And this tool is basically to simplify the process of selection of a single object or a part of an object in an image. For example, if you want to take out any object, let's say if you have a scenery and you have a car and that thing, you want to take it out from that scene, you can simply use this object selection tool and separate that object, particular object it very easily. One thing to note is that objects selection tool works very well with the defined objects and the regions which have very defined edges. But if you have any objects that have very less contrast with the background, in that case, I would say that objects selection tool may be a little tricky. This is the original file that has the tiff file that we started with. I just grabbed this one just to show you how we are going to use Object Selection tool to separate out all these motifs on their separate layers. To Open Object Selection tool only have to do with either. You can go to the toolbar and you will see this icon right here with the square selection. This one, the keyboard shortcut for objects selection tool is W again. So under W you can see that there are three types of tools that we have. Objects, selection tool. And other one is Quick Selection Tool and the Magic Wand Tool. Magic wand tool we have already covered. Now it's time to go with the object selection tool. I'll select this one. When I'm hovering over these flowers, you would see that it's automatically making a selection or making it blue. Just picking up the colors by itself. It automatically selects the object. It can identify the structure of the object, and it also identifies the colors of the object. And it clearly, again, and it can easily detect that object and we can make the selection. So if I go with this selection, Let's say I just, just going to click on it. And let's see what happens here. You can see that it has selected the whole flower. Another way of selecting an object with this tool is by using the Lasso mode or rectangle mode on top right here. You can use any of these modes depending upon the kind of shape that you want to select. I'll use the Lasso mode for this example. I will create a random shape around this flower and include some of the leaves around it. It takes a while to load up the selection, but that's okay. There you go. It has pretty much selected everything we wanted, but there is some area which it did not select. So to select that as well, what I'll do is I'll hold the Shift key on my keyboard. And again, using the lasso around this leaf. See it has selected the leaf that we wanted. Just looking around if we need to fix any selection. Nope, it looks perfect. Now our selection is done. I will get the selection and paste it on a new layer, just like we did in our previous lessons. So I will use the same command, Command Shift J or Control Shift J. If you're using PC. This will create a new layer for the selected motif. Just to check if there are any extra specs that needs to be cleaned up in the background. I will follow the same steps. I will create a new layer below this motif layer with black color. Then zooming in very closely and looking around, you can see that objects selection tool has really done a very nice job at cleaning up the background and leaving such crisp edges unlike other tools. And there are no extra pixels at the background. So I leave this layer and we'll follow the same steps for all the motifs and let you watch. Okay, So now all the leaves have been separated and cleaned up. I will name all the bears. This is an important step to keep all the things organized in your file. Now we have the file ready with all the clean motifs. Let's save it as a PSD file in our folder. The next video I will talk about how and why you need to convert your elements to smart objects before we proceed to creating patterns. 9. Smart Objects: All right, so we have covered a lot so far. Now it's time to learn about the smart objects. So what exactly are smart objects? And smart object is a non-destructive layer in Photoshop. So any edits that you apply to a smart object can be easily undone or modified and they're never gonna be a permanent change into the layer. So I'll show you the benefits of using smart objects in this video. The first benefit of converting your elements into smart objects is that you do not lose the quality at all of your elements if you change their size. And the second benefit of using smart objects is that if you are going to use the pattern preview dual, which we will discuss later in this class and move any elements on the edge. The normal element will be cropped, but the smart objects do not get cropped. In that case, I'll show you what the benefits and just add to make it easier for you. I have pulled one motive on a separate document and we'll show you how it works. Here is a motif which I pulled from our source file. The first thing I will do is create a duplicate layer of this motif by dragging the layer to the plus sign, like so. Let's change the name to Smart Object. Move it to the right. We can use the guides just to keep the sizes equal. If you don't see the ruler, you can go to view on top and then on the rulers, and then you can drag the guides like this. This step is not really required if you are okay with without the guys, That's fine. I'm just using the guides just for my reference. If you don't feel like you don't have to use it. The next step is to convert the right one to the smart object. And for that, just right-click on the smart object layer. And there you will see the option convert to smart object. There we go. Now it's time to create the copies of these two layers. So I'll drag each one of them to the plus sign below. That will create a copy of each of these layers. Now I will move each copy below their original layers. Let's label them on top. So just to avoid any confusion, the left ones are the smart, non smart objects and the right ones are the smart objects. Now the first is that we will do is by scaling each of these copies down to a very small size, and then we will bring them back to their original size as they were before. I'll start with a non smart object, making it very small using the transform tool, we will do the same thing to the copy of the smart object as well. Then we will scale them back up to their original size. Let's do it. Here is our non smart object. If we zoom in it a bit, you can see that it looks very hazy as compared to the original motif. If we do the same thing to the smart object, scale-up and zoom in. Can you see the difference? It looks the same as the original motifs. This is the first benefit of using a smart object in your work. Now are just the patterns you can use a smart objects in any of your design work when you're working with Photoshop. Now let's do the second test. I will move each of these copies to the edge. Sum of their parts should be outside the canvas. You can either try the pattern preview tool if you're using the latest version of Photoshop. But to keep it simple for everyone, I will use the crop tool to show how both the objects behave. In this case, basically the pattern preview tool crops everything that hangs outside the canvas. I'm simply moving both the copies towards the edges of the canvas. And then I will hit the Crop tool using the keyboard shortcut Z. You can also select the crop tool from the toolbar right here. Then I will double-click on the canvas or hit Enter. Okay, so let's see what happened to both copies. So you can see that the non smart object got cropped. But if we look at the smart object, you can see that it did not get cropped at all. Here are the two big differences that I wanted to show you. There are many more benefits of using smart objects, but for this class, we'll keep it simple and stick to these Totally. 10. Creating a Tile: Now we're all set with our more divs. Now it's time to finally create our pattern die. For that, we need to first open a new file or a new document, which we usually call as the pattern type. For that, all you have to do is go to the file on top and then hit new. Or you can also use the keyboard shortcut Control N or command in. If you're using a Mac, then you will see this window to select the size and format for the title. To create a new tile, we need to keep a few things in mind. The first is the size of the title. The most common format used for the repeating tile is a square. But you can also create a rectangular tile if you want to. But for the project of this class, I will be using the square format. Only. The size that I normally go with is ten by ten inches and sometimes eight by eight inches at 300 DPI, just makes sure that the resolution is at least 300 pixels per inch, or maybe higher, but it should not be less than 300 pixels. Then we have the color mode. Now it really depends on the requirement. Let's say if your clients specifically asked for CMYK mode, then of course, go ahead and select CMYK. But I usually create my files in RGB mode and if needed, we can always convert them to CMYK later. Then we just hit Enter. There we go. Now we are ready with the tile. Let's bring all the motifs in this document and get started with the most fun part of creating patterns. 11. Create Pattern -Traditional Method: Okay, So now we're ready with the tile. We have our motifs ready and cleaned up. It's time to finally create our pattern. This lesson, I will show you my older process of creating patterns. So if you're using the older version of Photoshop, this lesson is for you. In case you're using the latest version of Photoshop and are interested in learning about Pattern Preview tool. Then you can skip ahead to the next lesson. Now, let's get started with our older method. The first thing that we need to do is drag and drop all the motifs from our source file here in the new document. In order to select all the layers, all you need to do is select the top layer. And while holding the shift key on the keyboard, just go to the last motif layer and select that. This will select all the layers from dog to the last layer, and then you can drag and drop to the new document. Like so. Okay, so first thing first, we're going to save it as our tile. I'm going to name it as pattern. All right, We're ready to start working on our new pattern. Seamless patterns work as the motifs that are placed on the left side of the tile. And if they're touching the edge or even crossing the edge, they shouldn't be placed at the same position on the right-hand side. And same goes for the motifs on the top edge, crossing or touching the edge, there should be placed at the correct position on the bottom of the tile. This way, when the time is repeated, we don't see any cutting lines or themes and makes the flow of the pattern seamless and appealing to the eyes. So let's get started with our traditional way of repeating the motifs. We'll start with one motif. So I'm going to place it somewhere here. And talking about this particular flower. Now, this one is not only getting repeated from left to right, but it is also getting repeated on top to bottom. So we need to repeat it four times. 1234. Now I'll just place these florals randomly. And I'm going to scale them down for getting some interesting look and give some at the same size. Maybe move around, something like that. Make it a little smaller and rotate. And I think I'm just make it a little larger. We'll see. Okay, so I have placed almost everything over here, which is repeating, which is going to be repeated on the right hand side. The reason why I'm leaving this space empty here, because I know that this flower is going to be repeated over here. We'll leave it like that only. To repeat it on the right-hand side, you have to select all of these, all of these florals and elements which are touching this line over here. To do that, you just have to, you have to drag, click and drag your mouse and touch it to the edge. You will see this market holding the V, the move tool. You have to click on your mouse and drag it and touch it to this edge. Now this basically has selected the layers which are touching this left edge. So we'll group them together. Either you can just either drop it to this folder or you can use Command G. So I'll just hit Command G. And we have this group right here. As you can see. Now we need a copy of this group, which will be repeating over here. So I'll drag it down and release it on the plus sign. So I name it left elements. This one going to be right. Okay? So selecting the right elements group, I'll use the transform tool using Command D. And now we need to move it to the right-hand side, but we need to be very careful because here we need some mathematics. Now, as we know that the size of this style is ten inches by ten inches. That means this is 0. So this one is ten. As we know that when you select any elements or a group using the transform tool, you will see the x-axis and y-axis position on the selected items on top right here. This shows the exact position of the elements on the tile. So all you need to do in this case is just to add interest to x-axis, to move them from left to right, and add ten inches to the y-axis in order to move the elements from, from top to bottom. So we need to add ten inches to our x-axis so that we get, we move this one to exactly where we want it. So what I'm going to do is I'll just I'm not going to delete it. I'm going to add, that means simply typing plus ten inches IN. And you can see it has already moved in. Now hit Enter. Okay? So we have already moved our left elements to the right side. Now we're going to put our elements on the top. So start using these florals. Scaling up and down as I like. And maybe making it lighter, shorter. Taken. Maybe this one. I think it looks good. If not, we can always make some tips. So similarly, I'm going to use the Move tool and simply select and touch the top edge. And similarly, I'm going to do the grouping command G. Now this one is the top Ellie men's group. And I'm going to copy it. This is going to be the bottom element. Eventually we're going to get rid of these groups because they, they don't really make sense when you, when we're done with the pattern-making. But this works for now. So using Command D, we are working on the bottom elements. And similarly we are going to add ten inches to the x-axis and y-axis. We're not going to touch the x-axis here. I'll type plus ten inches. So we have repeated those elements to the bottom. Now we can fill in this area with more florals, elements, leaves, whatever. And make sure when you are filling up the space, you are not moving anything which is touching the edge because that's going to displace all your elements which are going to be repeated. So be very careful with that. I'm just clicking each element and holding Option key on the keyboard. I'm just dragging and dropping them. Alright, so maybe this one comes here. We can scale them down or up as we like. I'll just speed up the video and let you watch me fill this whole time. Alright, so our pattern tile is ready. In the next lesson, I will show you how you can test the tile, whether it repeats seamlessly are not. See you there. 12. Testing Pattern Tile: Now what I'm going to do is I don't want these groups to be there, so I just wanted to get rid of these groups. But before that, we need to just see whether this pattern is working well or not. So there are many ways to check how this pattern is working. One is like you can just save it as a JPEG and then open a larger file and then add this JPEG to that file and then test it out. So we'll start with that. Save a copy as a JPEG. Now I'll just create a folder here just to avoid any confusion. So this is the traditional method and we created the pattern tile, pattern tile one, and save it. Now I'll create a new folder, new file. And let's say we'll go with 18 inches by ten inches at RGB and 300 DPI. So what I'm gonna do is I'll go to File and Open command or open. And I'll just open this file open. Now, as you can see that this is locked. So to unlock it, you just have to double-click on this layer and hit okay, you just have to drag it to your new file and place it right here. Now to place the tile right on the edge, you can turn the rulers on using Command R or Control R. Then using the guides. And going to the option View. And under that you will see snap to guides. This will snap the tail right on to the guides. Like this. Now, again, I'll make a copy of this layer and I'll bring it over here. You can hold the Shift key while moving this one so that it keeps in line horizontally. Same thing. I'm going to copy these layers and using the Option and Shift key. And it's already guiding me. Now, if I zoom in, we can not really see any scene anywhere. That means this repeats perfectly. This is one way to test out your repeat whether it is working or not. Another way is I'm just remove all these layers. And another way is by going to, when you have this done, I'm going to select and select all. Or you can simply do Command, a, Command a basically select everything that is on that canvas and a tea leaves, anything extra that is outside the canvas. So we have selected all the elements that are on the Canvas. And now we'll go to Edit and Define Pattern. Garlic because most safe. Now I'll go to go to the larger canvas. And here I'll unlock this layer. Or you can create a new layer if you want to. You just make sure that this has some white background. Now, we need to put that pattern on this layer. So you have to double-click on this layer. And you will get this pop-up window where you will have this option Pattern Overlay, hit Pattern Overlay, and you will get all the patterns that you have created so far. So here you can select the pattern that you want to test out. So I'll select the last one which we created. Now the fun part here is you can test out this pattern and scale it up on small, make it smaller as you like. It's looking for perfect to me. So here we have our pattern created. Alright? So now the thing that we need to understand is first thing we have to save it as a PSD, which is our source file. Another thing that we need to do is we need to get rid of these groups. So to get rid of the groups, all you have to do is select each group, right-click on them and you need to hit and grew and grew up the layers. Same thing I'm going to do here on group, the layers, ungroup layers. So one thing that I wanted to show you is if you look at the layers panel here, you will see that all the layers have their names and copies. If you want to be very organized, you can name them accordingly and organize them like you want. But I'll leave it like that because it works perfectly. Another cool thing that you can do is that you can have different color of the background. So let's say if you don't want to use a white background or you want to have multiple versions of your pattern with different background colors, you can simply change the background layer, or let's say we'll create a new layer on top of the background layer and just make sure that this layer is first filled with white color. And then we'll double-click on this layer. And then we can go to overlay. And here you can try out different colors and see what color works best for your patterns. This is how you can change the color of the background for your patterns. Okay, so now we have learned how to create a seamless pattern using the traditional tools in Photoshop. Now it's time to jump over to the next lesson where I will show you the modern way of creating patterns using the pattern preview tool. 13. Create Pattern - Pattern Preview Tool: Okay, so now we have created our simple pattern using the traditional method that we can create in any version of Photoshop. Now I'm going to show you how you can create a pattern using the Pattern Preview tool. Just to get a glimpse off Pattern Preview tool, I'll just go ahead and show you how it looks and you can find it. If you're using the adobe Photoshop version 2021 or above, you can find this tool, tool which aren't Galois, lake impact on foreign goods or the urban gardener better. So I'm honored. So to view the pattern, to activate the pattern preview tool, you can go to view on tau. And here you have under the Flip Horizontal, you will find this option pattern preview. So if you open this, you can see that the whole area of Photoshop, the whole screen is covered by repeated same thing that we see in the Canvas. So basically what we have to do is we have to arrange these flowers in a way that they get repeated on the edges like we want. So I'll just close this view because this is our source file and we don't want to make any changes to this one. And I'll open another canvas. And we'll use the same size, ten inches by ten inches, 300 DPI and RGB color mode. Okay, so here we have our new document. Though. Now I'm going to drag all my elements right, to dislike we did before. And now we're going to just making sure that we have the elements as saved as smart objects. So we need to convert them to the smart objects directly. You can also do the same thing in your source file and save it. I just, I'm just increasing my work or you can actually select multiple layers and convert them to smart objects. Alright, so we have all my smart objects right here. And now we're ready to start our pattern tool. Have fun, okay, so open View and click Pattern Preview. Now we can see the repetition right here. It looks beautiful actually. I'm gonna one-by-one take the florals and start placing them in different locations. Maybe I'll just change the size of this one. Just make sure that you are using the smart objects because otherwise it's gonna be a problem. And something like this. Alright? As you can see that this flower is being replicated here, here and here. So we don't have to even, I'll do that transformation using our transform tool and duplicating the layers. It's doing. The job by itself, which makes our work much simpler. So it looks pretty nice. Now I'm going to okay. I'm going to just place okay. Go there. Maybe saying. Let's just flip them. Let's add these leaves. Ok, and now we will, as I told you earlier, since we are using the smart object tools. So I can scale them back to the original size, just makes sure that you are not scaling them larger than their original size. Then in that case it's going to be very, it's going to give very pixelated view, which is what we want. Okay? So I'm just trying to place these okay? Horizontal. Those even if some of the elements are overlapping each other, that's completely okay. Maybe this one here. And I'll flip it. The word may go and look to large empty areas. We can add some leaves. So just moving around a little bit. Yeah. And I think I had one last one here, making very small. Alright, so the pattern is looking nice, beautiful. If I zoom out, you can see that it's giving very nice look. So now we are going to save it as a pattern. And for that, we'll go to Edit and Define Pattern. And we can named my desk cosmos and name it as Pp, That means Pattern Preview. So let's open another document just to test this one out and unlock this layer. And double-clicking on this one, we'll hit Pattern Preview. And I just want to pick the last one which we just made. You can see that it is looking like nice pattern. We can scale up, scale down. One thing that I just noticed about this pattern is that the tiles are very obvious if we zoom out. So we can actually work on that part. If you can see that we can see a square right here repeating everywhere. So this is a very obvious pattern which sometimes does not look really great, so we can work on that. So I think this flower needs a little bit of tweaking. And maybe we can leave some gaps in between. Maybe they get smaller, their own thing like that. And if you want to just avoid such kind of duplicates is we can always make changes accordingly. So Pattern Preview tool gives a lot of freedom to work around your motifs. You can, while working, you can look at What's going on, What's looking right, and what's not. So it's a nice way to work with the patterns. Okay, So what I think is the problem, I can figure out does that, I think the motives that we have used in this pattern are very small. So let just make them a little larger because I just want to cut down that obviousness in the patterns. Something like this. If you want to bring this flower up, you can just pick it up. Move it around. Okay. Just making some random changes. Yeah, I'd still, it's looking like that only. This gives us great freedom. Okay? 14. Exporting Files: Alright, so we have created the pattern using the Pattern Preview tool. Now it's time to learn how to save and export your files. So the first thing that I always do is save the file as a PSD so that in case I needed in future, I have the source file ready. So I'll just go to File, Save As and select PSD. Let's create a new folder named Pattern Preview. And then I'll save it as let's say pattern dot PSD. Okay, so now if you want to save this pattern tile to showcase in your portfolio or on Instagram, or even send a low-res version of the file to the client for the review. You can just go to File Export, go to Save for Web. And then you'll see this pop-up. This basically gives you the ability to save the files, add 72 DPI. You can also change the size from here. And always make sure that you never upload the high-risk files online because you know, people may easily download and use it for free, right? So now let's say you have to share the pattern or send the pattern as a high-res image to the client. Or even if you are going to upload it on print on demand website, then you can simply go to file again and select, save as copy. And then you can choose the format from here, whichever you need to share or upload. So I usually prefer using tiff over JPEG because as a lossless file, JPEG usually tends to lose quality when you open and close the file multiple times. But for now, let's just go with JPEG and save it. Here we go. So this is a high res version which you can send to the client or you can upload on POD sites. And if you want to check how it looks, you can always go back and open that file. There you go. The tile looks perfect, ready for printing on products. Okay, so the next thing that I wanted to share is that let's say your client ask for the PSD file instead of flat JPEG or tiff file. In that case, patent review tool is somewhat not very ideal as we may have to come back and do a little more work to send the correct PSD with the client. So let's say your client is using an older version of Photoshop. So of course they will not be having the pattern preview tool in Photoshop. So that can be a problem, right? If you uncheck the pattern preview by going to View on top and then unchecking the Pattern Preview option. You can see that there are so many gaps in the tile, right? So in that case, what we have to do is that we need to go back and use the traditional method and repeat the motifs again as we did before. I'll just quickly start selecting the elements that are just touching the edges one-by-one and duplicate them and then repeat them on the other end. And there we have our PSD, which we can save and send it to the clients. Just before you send it to the client. Always tested wants to make sure it works perfectly. I've already explained this in lesson number 12, how to test a time. So you can always go back and refer to that. And the last way of saving the pattern is by simply selecting all the elements on the canvas by hitting Command a or Control a, and then go to Edit and Define Pattern. This will save the pattern in the Photoshop pattern library. Then you can test the pattern on a different canvas. And let's say it MIT ninja again. And I will unlock the background layer. Double-click again, and then we can select Pattern Overlay, then select the last pattern we just created. And you can also scale up or down as you like. So these are the ways that you can save your pattern and share with your clients or even create print ready file, ready to be printed on different products, or even upload them on print-on-demand, all that stuff. 15. Final Thoughts !: I hope you found this class helpful and software. And if you think you learned something from this class, please don't forget to leave for review for the Cloud. It really helps the class to get found by other students on the platform. If you want to share your projects on Instagram, on Twitter, you can tag me, add the rate militia. More than happy to share your project and thank you so much for joining me in this class. It really means a lot. All it takes to save all you need to take this class as I've also provided a seven-day link.