Pattern Preview in Photoshop - Deep Dive

1. PP Intro : Hi, my name is Tonya Brown and I'm a surface pattern designer. I have over ten years of industry experience creating seamless repeat patterns that are used in the fashion industry on fabric, home textiles, wallpaper, and even license my work under the name schottky brown. In this class, I'm going to teach you how to use the pattern preview feature in Adobe Photoshop to create seamless pattern repeats. It's a great tool to have. And this class is beginner friendly. If you have some experience creating repeat patterns or aren't sure how to use the pattern preview or smart objects within pattern preview. This class is for you. If you have experienced creating repeat patterns in Adobe Illustrator, but aren't sure where to get started in Adobe Photoshop. This class can also be helpful. I'm excited that you chose to learn with me. So let's get started. See you in Photoshop. 2. PP Class Project: The class project for this class is to create a seamless repeating pattern using the pattern preview feature in Adobe Photoshop. In 2021, Adobe Photoshop added the pattern preview feature. What you will need for this class is a desktop or laptop with the Adobe Photoshop software installed. Version 2021 or later. The class was filmed using the current 2023 Adobe Photoshop version. Please note that the iPad app Photoshop will not work for this class. The iPad app does not have all the features that the desktop software has in it. Have the pattern preview feature just yet. So you'll be able to follow along as long as you have the desktop software. I'll see you in Photoshop. 3. Lesson 1 Tour my PS Interface: In this lesson, we will just quickly review how I set up my Photoshop interface. You can choose to keep your interface the way that you like it, that works for your preferences and workflow. Or you can choose to match your interface to mine. On the right side here we have the toolbar and I like to keep my toolbar and condensed mode if you want to keep it in a single row, just use the double white arrows. Over here on the left side. I always keep my history panel and my layers panel open and to a wider display. Then I have additional panels open that I keep to the collapsed. Many icons. I have my brushes, settings, adjustments, color picker, color swatches, and the patterns. You can add or delete these as you feel. It works for your workflow or your current project. To change. You can always come to Window and add in extra panels here. Or change your workspace here. 4. Lesson 2 Create A new Document: In this lesson, we're going to go ahead and create a new document. Let's come over to File New. And we're going to label this polka dot. We're going to work in inches for today, and we're going to make it a four inch by four inch 300 DPI. Keep it in RGB color. Hit create. So here I have my rulers displayed. That's another thing that I keep continuous in my interface. And if you want to have them displayed, you can always come to view and click rulers or use the keyboard shortcut Command R to take your rulers away, Command R to add them back in. You can also change the units to centimeters pixels, or a unit of measure that works for your workflow or your country. So here we are with a four-by-four inch document. Let's just take a quick look here. We have the name of the document and that it's new in my history panel. And we have one layer, which is the background default layer, and it's locked. We're now going to add an additional layer. There are a few ways to add a layer to your pattern. One of the, one of the ways to add a layer is to come over into your layer panel and simply click the small plus. Here where we have a blank layer. It's transparent. If we turn off the background layer, we see this checkerboard effect, which lets us know that that layer is transparent. Another way to add layer is from the Layer menu. If you come up to layer and you come to New, you can add a layer from here as well. You can use the keyboard shortcut, Shift Command, end, Command N. And you will get this dialog box to tell you to name your layer or just hit. Okay, so now I have the original layer that I added with the plus an additional layer I added with my keyboard shortcut. I'm just gonna go ahead and delete that layer for now. Join me in the next lesson when we get ready to dive right in to Pattern Preview. 5. Lesson 3 Make a Basic Polka Dot: The first thing we're gonna do is start super-simple and create a polka dot pattern. I like to teach students in the beginning using simple shapes just to get the concept of repeat patterns. So I'm going to use the marquee tool to make a perfect circle. So let's go ahead and hit m. That gives me the Marquee Tool and I have my elliptical selected here. I'm going to come over and I'm going to hold the Shift click and drag. And if I hold the Shift button, it gives me a perfect circle release. And I have a circle selected. I can see that I'm on my layer that I created. And I'm gonna go ahead and fill that layer with black. So Option Delete. It's going to fill it with black because that's my foreground color. Now I have a perfect circle, but I want it to be centered. So I'm gonna go back to my move tool M and C that I can move this around. As we also see these pink lines flashing up on my screen. Those are the smart guides. I tend to keep those up because I like to use them to line things up in this program. And you can go to view, Show, smart guides. And those will give you those lines that flash up when you're using the Move tool. But to make sure that I have this circle perfectly centered in my document, I am also going to go ahead and use my alignment. So I'm going to select this layer, which is great. I'm going to hold the Shift, select to the second layer. Make sure I have my move tool, de-select the marquee. And now I'm going to make sure that my circle is perfectly aligned, vertical and horizontal. So just click, click, and now we know the circle is perfectly aligned and it come back over and just highlight this layer. Let's go up to View Pattern Preview. Now, we can see that this dot that we made in the middle is repeating itself perfectly over and over again. If I were to save this document as a repeating tile, this is what it would look like. Let's zoom out a little bit. It would be a perfect polka dot repeat. This repeat is a brick repeat or square. So we see that it's square like this. Let's come out of pattern preview. Now I want to make a half-drop polka dots. So I'm going to take this layer. I'm gonna come over here and I'm going to duplicate it. Again. There's multiple ways to duplicate your layer. You can do it from the Layer menu, duplicate layer. Or you can come over here and you can right-click over in the gray. And you're going to get a list of options here. With my right-click. I can go over, then click again, duplicate layer it. Okay? And now I have two copies of my circle. They pasted right on top of each other. So I'm gonna go ahead and hit V and grab that Move tool again. And I want to move it over so I can see that I do have two circles. If I were to move my circle past the edge of my paper, it looks like it's being cut or past the edge of my document. It looks like it's being cut off here. But if I were to come into Pattern Preview, it's cut off that circle, right? So let's come out of that. If I go ahead and grab it again, it's actually still there. So when you have something that you're moving off the edge of your paper, if it isn't cropped, Photoshop will still maintain what it is. So in order to not have Pattern Preview, crop your motif or your circle in the middle, what you're going to do is you're going to go to View Pattern Preview. Then we're going to grab our layer and move it here. And I'm looking for those smart guides to center my circle. Can see when they light up. Good. So now I have one circle here and one on my edges. If I zoom back out, I can see that I now have this half-drop polka dot, and my repeat is slightly different. If I turn this layer off and back to my original, turn this on and I have my basic half-drop or polka dot pattern. We're going to come out a pattern preview. You come out of pattern preview. We see here that we have our perfect repeat tile that we can then save. And we know that this polka dot will repeat seamlessly. 6. Lesson 4 Scatter Polka Dot: In this lesson, we're going to make another polka dot, but this time we're going to make a more scattered layout. So I'm gonna start the same way and add a layer to work on. I have my blank layer, it's automatically highlighted. I'm gonna go ahead and use that marquee tool again. I'm going to hold Shift and drag, and I have a perfect circle again. I'm going to use my black, which is my foreground color and fill that circle. Select. And now I have this perfect round circle to work with. I want to use this and create a pattern that fills this space with all kinds of circles. So the first thing I'm going to do is duplicate my circle motif, my little polka dot. I'm going to do it from the side panel. So Duplicate Layer, Duplicate Layer, Duplicate Layer, duplicate layer. So now I have 1234 copies of my little polka dot. Grab that move tool and start moving them around so that I can see it. So just to point out that my move tool is highlighted. And up here I have auto select with layer, because I'm working in single layers, I'm going to keep this on. And when I'm hovering over the pixels that Photoshop is reading, it's going to automatically highlight that layer. So that automatically highlighted the second one. So watch over here as I come over and grab, see how it automatically moved to this layer because that's what is selecting. Just watch this panel for a second. As I walk around and select the dots. You can see that every time I'm hovering over the pixels that Photoshop can lead, it is changing and automatically selecting that layer that that dot is on. It's a pretty cool feature and make your workflow a little bit faster to not always have to go back and forth to your layers panel. What I want to do is create even more dots. So I'm going to do this quickly by highlighting this top layer holding Shift and selecting all of them. Go over here to duplicate layers. And it's going to say, okay, and now I have all these copies. So again, if I click over here, it de-selected my layers and I can start finding all of my polka dots. I think we have 12345678. I have eight polka dots. That's about right. Now. I want to take all of these polka dots and I'm going to start to push them to the edges of my document. But if we remember from the lesson before, if I move it over like this and go into Pattern Preview, it isn't going to read it on both sides. So it's important that if we have our motifs in the middle, we want to come to view Pattern Preview first. Then we can start moving our motifs to the edge to create a more scattered layout of our dots. And this is super fun using pattern preview because it's in real time and you can watch your elements create this repeat pattern. It's such a neat feature for surface pattern designers. Let's zoom out and take a look at our dots. I'm going back to my move tool and I can really see maybe I want to do this, and then maybe I want to fill in that space a little bit there. I'm going to come out of pattern preview. Just to come back to looking at my overall repeat. We're going to come back over to that move tool, and I'm going to come to this one. So I've clicked on top of it and you can see it's this particular polka dot layer one, copy six. I'm going to hover over it and I'm going to hit the Alt key. When I hit the Alt or Option key. And you can see I get that double arrow. If I hold it down, click and drag. It's going to give me an additional copies. And drop. Here we go. There's the extra copy of that polka dot. So it's an easy and fast way to work. Come back over to Pattern Preview and I can see how my overall pattern is working. If I'm happy with that, and I want to save this pattern swatch, I'm going to come out of pattern preview. And I have this pattern swatch that I can save. I can keep it in layers. I can take all of these layers and put them together. So let's go ahead and do that now. I'm happy with my layout and I don't want to edit. These are move them individually. I can always condense them. So right-click with all of your layers selected and hit Merge Layers. Notice I didn't include my background, so I can still manipulate the color of the background and my polka dots on top. I can go ahead and save this. Save will save the document as it is an override the original file that you made. Save As we'll save and additional copy of it. If you change the name and save, a copy will give you additional file formats. So this is where you can find a JPEG or a GIF or another file format other than Photoshop or the layered files and save and save it. 7. Lesson 5 Color Changes with PP: In this lesson, we're going to go over how to simply change colors in a simple pattern like this. But before we get there, I just want to note that creating a simple graphic pattern like this can easily be done in Illustrator as well. The main difference, an advantage to using simple shapes like this in Illustrator is that your patterns swatch would be scalable. You'd be able to take the simple polka dot pattern and scale it infinitely up or down. That is not the case in Photoshop because we're working in pixels. It is not infinitely scalable. You can scale down, but not up. And that's the general rule in Photoshop. It doesn't mean that this won't print or display in a crisp way, because we started with 300 pixels per inch DPI. If we zoom in, we can see the edges here of our polka dots and we can see those pixelated edges. If you were working in Adobe Illustrator, you would have a smooth, clean line. So I just wanted to point that out and let's get started with changing the color. Since we condense all of our polka dots to one layer. In the last lesson, I like to use a quick way of changing the whole layer at one time. And that is using the pixel lock feature. If I have this layer highlighted and I click the pixel lock, I can go ahead and choose a different color so that the tutor color picker, choose this pinkish red color. It's also now displayed as my foreground color. And all I need to do is my quick fill, which is Option Delete or Alt Delete. And I have a new color. I can do the same thing for the background color. Grab a different color, and make sure that layer is higher highlighted. And the same thing. I'll have this pink polka dot. And it's exactly the same repeat. And I can save it as a different swatch or file. Let's go back into pattern preview. And we see it's displayed exactly the same. The particular color changing feature does work well. You are alive and Pattern Preview as well. So I can do exactly the same thing. Keeping my pattern preview open, change the color of this layer, but let's change it in a different way. Instead of using just a straight color and filling the layer or the pixels, let's try doing an adjustment so we can play with the colors. So Image Adjustment, Hue Saturation. We get this additional dialogue box and we can sort of play with what the color looks like. We can go down or up and it's lightness. We can add saturation or take it away. So let's make this yellow. Okay, Let's come over to our Puppet out layer and do the same thing. Again, it's image adjustments, hue and saturation. And the quick key is Command U. So command, you will bring up the same dialogue box. And again, I'm going to adjust those polka dots. And if I want them to be pure white, I can just take it up to white. Take it down to black, somewhere in the middle. Take up the saturation and change this. Let's do this. Sort of fun pastel, pink and yellow polka dot. And we can see our pattern displaying and how it works. So changing color in that aspect will work while you're in Pattern Preview or not. Again, we can come back out of pattern preview and we have a seamless repeat tile here. 8. Lesson 6 Creating Pattern Swatches: In this next lesson, we're going to explore creating patterns, swatches out of these little seamless tiles of polka dots that we've just created. So here is my patterns swatch panel. If I click this open, I have displayed here, I created some patterns, swatches already of the original polka dots. We made the box repeat in the half-drop repeat. And I'm going to show you how to create pattern swatches from this tile. There's a few ways, again that we can do this. Again in this panel open, we see this little plus symbol. It is available. If I simply click the Plus, it's going to add exactly what I have displayed in my document as a repeat. Whether that is in repeat correctly or not, that is what Photoshop is reading. It is reading your document. It okay. And we see our new polka dot is displayed there. Another way to add a pattern swatch into your panel is to do it from your Layers menu. But first, I'm going to just point out that I have two of each. And what I've done here is I've included the background and I've included a transparent background, white background and transparent background. And this one is a white background. Because when you add the swatch in here, photoshop is automatically flattening what it sees as if it is saving a little tiny JPEG. It's a flattened file. So if I go to use this swatch, which I will show you in the next lesson. It is going to be a flat version. It is not going to be used with these layers. The next swatch I'm going to save, I'm going to turn off the background layer and I now have a transparent background and my little black polka dots. I'm gonna come over to edit and come down to Define Pattern. Click this, and you will get a, another dialog box the same as before and hit, Okay, and there it is. So you can do it from here or your menu. Now I have all of these individual patterns, swatches displayed. So come join me in the next lesson and I'll show you how we will use those. 9. Lesson 7 Using your Pattern Swatches: We're gonna go ahead and create an additional document so that I can show you how using those patterns swatches will work. Let's go to New Command, Enter on your keyboard. And we're going to name this, repeats. This time. I'm going to make sure that this document is bigger than the 4 " by 4 ". And we'll see why in just a minute. So let's create an eight by eight inch document. It's double the size of my first document. What I'm gonna do is keep the background. Keep the background white, keep it locked, and just go ahead and click that plus add another layer. In general, when we're working in Photoshop, layers are such a pillar of the program that I tend to always have a background layer that IV, IV, that is a background color to the patterns that I'm making. It's good practice to always add a layer and not work on that layer. So there's a few ways that we can add our pattern swatches to this document. Always a few ways to do the same thing in Photoshop, ads, in Adobe Illustrator or many of the Adobe software programs. Let's come over to here. And if I click over here on this layer and I go ahead and click this, what it did was it added an adjustment layer. It added an adjustment pattern fill layer. I have my pattern repeated right here. Let's see what that looks like if I go to View Pattern Preview. So Pattern Preview is going to display this pattern fill that I added onto my screen. And it's going to look exactly the way it did before in our original polka dot that we made first in this course. It's the square. Repeat this brick repeat. But my document is eight by eight. So that little blue square, that bounding box that you see is my document size. It's 8 " by 8 " and if you remember, my pattern was 4 " by 4 ". So what it did was it fit perfectly into that document where it was four by four within an eight by eight. Alright. Let's go and delete that layer. Add a new fresh layer, and let's come over to the other way to use pattern fill. So now we're going to come up to Edit. And we're gonna go to fill and click on Fill. And I get this dialogue box from this dialog box, I actually have a few options of how I want to fill this layer. I can fill it with a pattern. I can fill it with black, white, gray. I can fill it with my foreground color. So if I hit foreground color and hit OK, it's just going to make it black and step it back command Z. But as you can see, I did have the option to fill it with pattern, which is what I use that for the most. So if I go head and I use pattern, and then I have this, I click on this, and I see the exact same library that I saved over here. Here's the library here, and here it is. Here. If I go ahead and click that first one, that dot and hit, Okay. I see my patterns show up in that first layer, but note the difference that it doesn't say pattern, fill it, fill this layer with just the flat pattern, and let's look at it and pattern preview, but it looks exactly the same. There are differences between the pattern fill in the pattern layer. We'll review that in a moment, but I wanted to note the difference that this is the entire layer filled with a pattern versus a pattern fill layer, which is more of an adjustment layer. Delete that. And let's repeat the process with the transparent pattern. Here my pattern fill. Now let's use this one. This one is the transparent background. And I go ahead and add the pattern fill. But this time if I turn off that background, I see that I do have a transparent background. So even though it's a pattern fill, it is displaying only the pixels that were defined by that, which were the polka dots and leaving my background empty. And if I wanted to add a color, I can add a color. And you will see that it is in fact transparent. That feature of adding a pattern fill layer, I want you to hold onto that thought and save it for later for more complicated patterns. And know that if you have transparency to your pattern, that it will hold in using this pattern fill feature. Let's step it back. I'm gonna delete that and then just show you exactly the same thing from the menu. Edit Fill. Let's go ahead and grab that same one with the transparent background hit. Okay. And again, I have the same thing only this time. I have a filled to the layer and I still have this. Now the difference between using it fill from my menu versus the pattern fill layer is that I can edit them differently. And I'm going to show you in the next lesson the difference between editing. And then we'll be diving into more complicated motifs for Pattern Preview. 10. Lesson 8 Differece in Edits fo Fill Pattern VS Pattern FIll: In this lesson, we will go over the differences between editing the pattern Fill Adjustment layer versus the fill the layer with a pattern from the menu. So let's start here. When we filled this layer from the menu, Edit Fill, we were telling it to put the pixels in that layer. If we do that, we have the option to edit that layer exactly the way that we would that we did with changing the color. And you have the flexibility to edit these elements. So let's grab this. And we're just going to select that individual polka dot. And you can see that I can move this around and edit because the pixels are being read on this layer. I can also edit the color the same way I did by pixel locking it or adding, doing an adjustment with the color. So let's say I want to, I have that one selected. I wanted to do the whole thing, so I'm sorry, de-select. I just have the layer selected. Let's add, let's add some color first, let's pixel lock it and grab a color and fill it. And then we can always adjust the color or pick a different color and fill it again. Right? So I'm able to edit this whole thing. My pattern is seamless. It's important that the original pattern fit exactly two times into this document. Now, let's look at the audibility, the pattern fill. So I have no options to change the color. I cannot edit the individual pieces. I can move them around like this. So I can move it. I can move where the pattern lands. That's something I can edit in this layer. I'm going to show you other things that can be edited in this layer. So if I double-click right in this side of the window, so click, click and give this pattern fill dialog box. And I have some more choices here. I can scale this pattern. I want to bring it down to 50%. So I just made it smaller. So remember we're in pixels, I can go smaller but not larger. I can also change the angle. Now, you can see that when I change the angle, the repeat change in that does not work. In Pattern Preview. It didn't hold my diagonal. So that is not an option in Pattern Preview, but scale is. And we can still move where the pattern lands within my box here. So that's basically the idea that you have to understand what you can change within this pattern fill layer versus the pattern being filled into the layer. And it's from the menu. I want you to really grasp this concept because this becomes important and more complicated. Designs. And knowing that the pattern fill layer is really just a flattened version of your file versus something that you can manipulate is important to know the distinct distinction between those two things and when you might use them. 11. Lesson 9 Multilayers & Grouped Motifs: In this lesson, we're going to start to dive into using pattern preview with multi-layered or more complicated motifs. And let's take a look at this file. I created this little flower motif in the iPad app, Procreate. While I was drawing, I consciously made the decision that each different color was going to be created on a separate layer to create this flower. So let's come over here to look at that. Here is my middle, here are my petals, and here is my stem. I created this file. I imported it from procreate into my desktop or a Cloud service, and I saved it as a PSD file. This way, I can open it in Adobe Photoshop and have my layers preserved exactly how I created them in the Procreate happens. You don't have to work in the Procreate app. There are many apps to work in and there are many ways to work. So the first thing we're gonna do is take this flower and group it together. I'm gonna go ahead and highlight or select each layer. So hold the Shift, click, click, click, and then I'm going to right-click to create a group. And again, we can do that by either right-clicking and creating a group, group from layers. Or we can come over here and click that little folder. When I click that folder, it takes all of my highlighted layers and puts them into one group. If I expand, I can see that all of my layers are right there. So I'm going to double-click on this to change the name, mean it, flower one. So a few things about grouping a motif together. I still have the individual layers. But in terms of editing and manipulating, it makes it a little bit easier to not have to move each layer at a time. So let's condense that. And I have flour one. Let's grab that move tool. So V and the shortcut. But now I want to show you the difference of what happens if I have Layer selected. If I come over here, photoshop is still reading that I only want to grab a layer and move it with my move tool. So there's the highlighted later in ETE layer. And even though it was in a group, it's still grabbed that layer. But that's not what we want because now my flower is all deconstructed. We want to keep it together. So let's step it back. And you can see why I keep my history Open. Easy step back. If I want to use this move tool and grab the entire group at a time, what I need to do is come over to auto select and simply tell it that I want to work with a group instead. Now when I come over, I'm moving the whole group at a time. So we're going to take this same concept of having this group and use pattern preview to create a half drop repeat, which means I need this whole group duplicated and pushed to my corners. So let's take this group and the same way we can duplicate an individual layer, we can also duplicate the group. Let's right-click. Make sure you're on the gray part and you get this side menu here. And I'm going to duplicate group. It's going to ask sname, it, hit. Okay. And now I have my copy. The same way I was able to grab whatever was on top and move it and see that it was there. I can do the same thing with the groups because I have auto select group highlighted. Now let's bring it over to Pattern Preview. You're in pattern preview. I can see my flower and I know that I wanted more of a half-drop. So I'm going to drag this whole thing up here. And let's come out. And now I can see this cool half-drop that I created super-fast and pattern preview with my groups. And I've got this really pretty pattern. For the sake of making my pattern, I can keep the motifs all going the same direction, but I always like to create a little bit of movement. So I'm going to come over here while it Pattern Preview, so you can see what types of editing you can do and cannot do in Pattern Preview. I'm going to make sure that I have this group highlighted. I can always turn that on and off to see which one I am working with. And I'm gonna come over to my menu here, edit, transform, flip horizontal. And that's an edit that we can do. Well. Pattern P views open and it's really cool because now I can see this movement and how it's working. Maybe I want this one to come up here or this one to come over. And it's just such a great feature to see these edits live in your repeat. Come out a pattern preview and we can see what the seamless repeat tile looks like. If we were to save it just as it is. 12. Lesson 10 Editing Options With Layers: Now that we've created this new seamless repeat using various layers, we have lots of options about how we can go forward to edit this file. So bear with me as I go over all of the choices that you have. Bear in mind that each, each of these choices is going to be a personal preference on how you like to work and your workflow. So if we dive deep a little bit into the layers, Let's display this a little bit more. I have my first flower and my second flower. I have my first stem, and my second stem, and my petals, and my petals. Now, you can keep your file with all of these layers and go in and edit each layer. Perhaps you want to change the colors a bit. Have the ability of changing each single element in your repeat design. That is a possibility. And one way to work, the more you do this, the more you will find the workflow that you want to use and what's going to work best for your style. And you just have to play around with it. See, I did not have that pixel off. That mistake was good, so it filled the entire layer with the color. In order to pixel lock it. I want to do that to only have Photoshop or read those pixels. So now if I go into my pattern preview, I have two different color floral motifs. And if I pull out, we can see my pattern changing. So that's one way to work is to keep everything on a separate layer so that each layer you can edit on its own. You still have the Move ability. Let me take off the pixel locks. And if I tell it to move this layer only, I can still manipulate one thing at a time. Maybe I want to command T rotate this a little bit and have it display a bit differently. So keeping things in separate layers gives you the maximum stability. So this is one option. Let's come out of our pattern preview for a second, and let's step it back to our repeat. Another option is to condense the motifs into one layer. So we can do that very quickly and easily by right-click and Merge Group. Right-click and merge group. So what this is doing is taking all three of these pieces and colors and putting it onto one layer. Now, I can edit it still. I can edit as a group so I can do Command T. I get my bounding box. I can scale from here. I can rotate. But it has it all on one layer and together. So editing the colors might be a little bit trickier. I'd have to edit it as an adjustment or an adjustment layer and change the colors this way. And that is another option for working. And let's just see what that looks like can help to Pattern Preview and we can see what it's looking like here. Step it back, and now we're back in these groups. Another way to do this is to condense the colors that are the same to the same layer. So that process is a little bit more lengthy, especially if you have a ton of motifs and a ton of layers. But here's the simple version so that you understand the concept. Should you want to do that? If I want all of my flower middle's on one layer, I'm going to select that. I'm going to hold the command key and select the other. So it's middle, middle is selected. You can see it's light gray highlighted. And again, that's the Command key. If I am selecting things all next to each other, it's the Shift key. But if I want to select things that aren't right next to each other or on top of each other. I use the command. I can then right-click and merge those layers. So what it did was take my orange pieces and put them on the same layer. Let's go ahead and do that in Pattern Preview so you can really see the pattern coming together. Now. I have my pink petals and my pink petals, so they're separate right now. But I am happy with my layout. I'm going to keep it as it is. I don't want to edit it anymore, so I'm going to condense my pink petals together. So select command, right-click Merge layers. Now I have my orange on one layer and my pink on one layer. And let's get those stems. Select and command, and go ahead and merge layers. And I now have them all in this one folder. This folder is now empty just to make sure I click it on and off and I can just put it in the trash right there now. But I have is my middles, my petals and my stems, each on their own layer. And I can continue to edit this in a way and change the colors. And let's do that real quick. And we'll make them purple or in bluish purple flowers. And there we go, and that's how quick it can be. So those are just some options of manipulating, condensing your layers to make your workflow a little bit easy or not. Remember, you can always keep many layers up if that helps you with the ability of your file. 13. Lesson 11 Using an adjustent layer in PP: Yet another option for editing in Pattern Preview is adjustment layers. So you can use adjustment layers in a document that you're not doing pattern preview, that's fine, but just also know that an adjustment layer will work in Pattern Preview as well. So we had added an a layer that was a pattern fill adjustment to our document before, but this time we're going to add an adjustment layer to these. And instead of using pixel lock to color, we're going to use the adjustment layers. So whichever layer I have highlighted, if I come down here to this little black and white symbol, and I click on it. These are the various adjustment layers that I can add. And it will add above that layer that's selected. So let's add a. There's our pattern one that we added before and the other document, Let's add a hue and saturation because that will work on color. So again, you see this little chain link and this symbol, and this is going to affect the layer below it. And we can use the adjustments which are the same adjustments that you can get from here from Image Adjustments, except this is non-destructive and we'll see why in a minute. So if I sort of swing here over and I've now got yellow patterns, it changed this layer below it. If I click off, it's affecting all the ones below it. So it's also affecting the stem turn blue, but it didn't affect this one. Adjustment layers are a great way to play with color and adjust things in a more non-destructive way or a less permanent way. So if I turn this off, I'm back to my pink and my green. Let's see what happens if I pull this layer and put it on the stems. So you can see it's now left the pink as is unchanged, but the stem to blue. Let's see what happens if I pull it all the way up and on top of here, it's changed all three layers. And you can use all kinds of layers to adjust. You double-click here, you got this one. And now we can adjust here, but it's still affecting the one below it. So there are amazing things about using adjustment layers, but also know that there are some limitations to it. Let's see if we take this away, we can see that our original colors are there. So it's a way to play with color and see about fixing it and not making it permanent. And you can always take these away and pixel lock something and change the color of that. So there's a lot of options for changing and different reasons for using adjustment layers versus an adjustment from your menus. Again, same end result here, but different way to do it. Doing it from your menu is more of a permanent. And doing it here is more of a non-destructive, non-permanent way of editing. Lots of choices. Again, you have to choose what works best for you and your art work. And you'll know after playing with these different choices, which one's going to work better and which one that you like better. 14. Lesson 12 Creating and Using Smart Objects: The next thing we're going to dive into for using Pattern Preview is the use of smart objects and Pattern Preview. So smart objects can be made from a single layer or from a group. And here I have my original group. And let's expand. I have my middle petals and stem. And what I want to do is take this entire group and make it into a smart object. I have my group selected. I'm going to go to right-click and go to Convert to Smart Object. Hit. Okay, and we can see that the thumbnail has changed. I have this little smart object symbol, and I can see the entire motif that I don't see the individual pieces anymore. I can even grab my Move tool and move it around altogether. I don't have to worry about auto select on layer because it's reading the smart object as one layer. But I still have the ability of the middle pedal and stems because if I click on my smart object and you have to click directly on that little tiny icon. You can click over here or over here. It has to be right on top of their double-click. And it's going to open a new document window. And it's my smart object. So it has this filename, PSB, and that's the filename for smart objects. So here we have my original of my middle pedal and stem. Here is where I can do my editing in my smart object. So if I wanted to change the color of those petals too blue, I can do that here. Then I'm gonna come over and close. It's going to ask me if I want to save, hit Save. And then we see that here it changed in the master document. So there's my smart object. Now here is the great part about working with smart objects in Pattern Preview. So we are going to duplicate the Smart Object. So duplicate layer, hit. Okay, and we can see that I have to smart object layers that are identical. Come over to pattern preview and get that move tool and drag it on over. Make my little half-drop repeat here. And we can see that I have these two layers. Now, I'm going to click Okay, and I don't, sorry, I didn't need to hit Return. It's just going to go there. Now, watch what happens if I come out of pattern preview. All of a sudden, all the pieces over here get clipped off and you're thinking, oh, that's not good. Where did my my pattern go? I still see it here. It is still there. But for whatever reason, Adobe Photoshop and their pattern preview aren't reading the other pieces, but it doesn't mean that they aren't there. If you go back into Pattern Preview mode, There's your motif and it is there. Now, that does take some getting used to if you're going to work with smart objects. And you might be wondering, Well, if I can't really tell where my things are, if I come out of pattern preview, that can get confusing. However, I'm going to show you what does work with using smart objects and why you may want to consider doing this with your work. So let's go to this original one, and I'm gonna go into my motif here and I can edit in here. So let's do an adjustment. I'm gonna do an adjustment from here and not an adjustment layer. And we'll change that to yellow. Maybe we will switch this and I'll put white and my foreground will make it a true Daisy and hip. Okay? Actually, no, I want it to be able to see those petals. So let's get like a pale pink. There we go. I have my pale pink and let's even change the stem a little bit. Just change it to maybe that bluish color. Now I've changed this in my smart object layer here. Then I'll click Close, hit Save, and it changed the other one. So that's another way to adjust all of your light motifs that you created Smart Objects and have them changed all at the same time. So it changed this one, but also changed the additional Smart Object because I made a copy from this. So if I had another layer and I just added some motifs there that we're not in that smart object. I changed this smart object and it's not going to affect anything that isn't a smart object. See, it only changed this because that was the smart object. And any smart object that's duplicated from the original will change. That can be a great, great editing tool for certain types of patterns in certain instances. Let's get rid of this. So just know that using smart objects is an option. Again, if I come out of pattern preview, I'm losing this. So if I go to save my file like this, if I save it as a Photoshop layered file, it's going to preserve all of my smart objects, the smart layers. The smart objects and those layers will still be there and editable. But I can't create a flattened JPEG file to save, maybe upload onto a POD site. So what I need to do is I need to rasterize these layers. So let's come into Pattern Preview, and let's go ahead and rasterize the layer and rasterize the layer. So let's right-click rasterize. And now I can see them. And if I come out of pattern preview, there it is, my layers are rasterized. Know that if you're going to save a JPEG version of this, you must rasterize your layers first and then save. If you were in not smart object layers like this, you'd be able to save a JPEG as long as all of your things are showing your motifs or whatever you've created illustrations, drawings. But know the difference between if you have smart objects, you will not be able to save a flattened file from the smart object file. So my advice would be to save one smart object file, rasterize your layers, save that file, save a flat file. It's always a good idea to have more copies and different file formats than not. You would hate to save a flattened file of this and then not be able to come back and edit it the way you like. So always save your very layered or smart object file and then a flattened version or a more simplified condensed version. 15. Lesson 13 Watercolor Motifs & Smart Objects: In this next lesson, we're going to review some very important things to know about using pattern preview to create patterns and using smart objects and when it's a good idea to use smart objects and when you don't need to. And here we're going to be using this artwork that I created. It's Bird of Paradise watercolor paintings. And I'm using this on purpose because there are a lot of artists out there that really start their art process painting by hand, either with watercolors or acrylic paint or gouache on paper. And then we scan our artwork in and we attempt to digitize it. And then this is a way that we can digitize our work and then turn it into a pattern. And that's why I'm using this particular watercolor piece. So I'm just going to note that I've already gone ahead and removed the background of these watercolors. It's not something I'm going to review in this course just because it's a completely separate skill. There are several ways to do it, and there are a ton of great classes here on Skillshare and other resources on YouTube and from Adobe Photoshop that you can learn to remove the background of your watercolor or gouache or ink paintings that you've created on paper. So let's go ahead and talk about ways that we can create this into a repeat. If I go ahead and go into pattern preview, I can see that it's going to make a repeat out of whatever's on my canvas. But I need to have some of my elements start pushing over into my bounding box to create that repeat, I'm going to grab my Lasso Tool, L on the keyboard. And I love using the Lasso selection tool because it's really just like a drawing tool, but it makes us selection. So it's really, really great and organic. And once you release, it, selects this piece. And you can see, because I'm in Pattern Preview, it is kinda selecting a little funky and it's cutting it off at those lines. If I hit V and I go to move this element, I had the wrong layer background. It's going to move my element up here to the corner. And I can see the selections are over here. But if I want to transform it, and I go to Transform, it's doing this funky thing. And it's wanting to select the entire document size and bounding box and we don't want that to happen. Let's come out of pattern preview mode and let's step it back to open. So now I'm gonna come over and grab my Lasso tool again. And I'm going to select this. And it's going to select it. Now I'm going to come to pattern review. And if I go ahead and hit the transform, you see how because I was not in Pattern Preview, it's just selecting what I told it to within the confines of the bounding box or document size. So I have my arrows here and if I want no, sorry. Let's go back to make sure I have that right layer selected command T to select this for transform. And I'm able to manipulate it. And I can even move it to the corner, right, which is great. And as long as I have it selected before I go into Pattern Preview, it will go seamlessly to that area. So it would be select and transform. Then go into Pattern Preview in that order. However, once I hit return and a de-select, if I want to come back and manipulate this again. Now that I have it crossing my bounding box, it is going to do the same thing it did before because I am in Pattern Preview. And if I try to hit Command T to rotate it again, it is going to select my entire box. So that isn't great for working fluidly and creating repeat patterns because it's going to chop this off. And if I come out of it, you will see the error. And that error is in fact, they're unlike the smart objects that disappear and reappear. So a way to combat that is to use your smart objects. And since this watercolor is all the variation is in the one motif. This is when using smart objects really is a great idea because you don't have to worry about all of the layers and you can just worry about the motifs. So let's go ahead and select that and make sure I'm on the right layer this time. Select this motif again, and this time I'm going to copy it. And just for ease of this lesson, we're gonna go into a brand new blank document. And I'm going to paste my watercolor here. But this time I'm going to turn it into a Smart Object. Convert to Smart Object. So there we got that little icon again, and now I have a smart object. Let's come over to Pattern Preview. Grab my Move tool and move it on over. And let's duplicate that smart object. We want to duplicate layer. Okay, I have another one. Let me just move the other one back on over. And now I have this middle one selected. I'm gonna hit Command T, and I'm just going to turn this one around just to create some variety. And you can see the difference of the selection when I hit command T for transform, my bounding box is around just the motif. It's not selecting this whole thing even though I'm in Pattern Preview. So when you're working with these painted motifs where it's not in layers. The smart objects are really, really great to use in Pattern Preview. So let's see this one and then remember if I click on it, it's going to automatically select that layer. I have auto select layer, and I can even manipulate this one. Now I can turn this one all around and it's not going to cut it off because it's a smart object layer in the pattern preview. So basically, the premise is that if you're using a single layer Smart Object in Pattern Preview, it works absolutely beautifully. If you want to use groups and multilayers and change them into smart objects, so just know that it's a slightly different path. So personally, I tend to use smart objects in a situation like this, where it's one motif per layer as opposed to a group in a Smart Object, but they are both absolutely options. So let's come out of pattern preview. And now we're going to see that same thing happened where the smart objects still disappear. But you know what to do and you know that you need to rasterize those layers in Pattern Preview to make them appear. But let's also look at changing the motif. We have our smart object layer here that comes up in the individual file with the PSB file format, we can make some adjustments. So let's add an adjustment layer on top of this. And again, all of my colors are on one layer. So this is as a potential way to edit your watercolors and play with what you want the watercolor to look like. So I'm gonna hit Okay, and again, it's non-destructive. So if I turn this off, it's still going to look by the original. I'm gonna hit OK. Save. And then we're going to see that all of my motifs changed and it changed each individual. Let's grab a different bird of paradise and add it to our design to make it a little more complicated. So there's my other element. I can add this one in, and I'm gonna convert this one to a smart object. And I'm gonna duplicate it this time. I'm just going to hold, I'm going to hover over it and hold my Option Alt key and drag and, and copying that smart layer, I'm going to transform and transform over here. So let's just put this one over here, okay? Then maybe move this one up here just for some variety in the motifs and then come back to this one and just change the direction. So now I have these motifs playing with each other. If I want to change the color of this one. The reason why it's giving me so many pixels here is because when it pasted, it added the rest of that. But at the moment we don't have to worry about it. We could go ahead and clip it. And hopefully it will not change. Let's just add in, let's just adjust from the menu. So again, this is more permanent. And that just so we can see crazy about that, let's add a different, Let's add color balance. Let's add some yellows, red. Maybe we change the highlights just a different way to manipulate color in Photoshop, something to play with it, Okay, see if it actually did clip my design. Let's step it back. And we're going to just go into that one and we're going to leave that space because Photoshop needs that space. And just quickly adjust so you can see the difference. Okay, So it changed all of them. So if you're working in watercolor or painted motifs, this could be a really great workflow for you. Again, if we come out of the pattern preview, we're going to see that all of that's getting chopped off and it's difficult to see. And in order to bring it back, if I were to just condense all of these, you're going to see that it stays chopped off and I come back to Pattern Preview. That is a problem. So that is why it is important to be in Pattern Preview first and to rasterize each layer. If you don't do that. And you condense the layers without rasterizing, which is basically saying it's undoing the smart object layer. You're going to lose your objects. And then you can go ahead and condense all of these to one layer. Now you have all of your pattern on one layer. You can save that version, save the smart object version for maximum, maximum adjustments. If you wanted to adjust the overall feeling of the pattern like this, you can do an adjustment there. You can add an adjustment layers, lots of ways to work, and lots of options. And now you know what you can and can't do in Pattern Preview. 16. Lesson 14 Finalize Pattern & Saving Options: Here we are getting ready to finalize the design using Pattern Preview, smart objects, and all of the tricks that we have to make a repeat pattern in Photoshop. I've gone ahead and created several layers of these bird of paradise watercolor flowers. And I've gone ahead and make each layer a smart object layer. When I come into pattern preview, I can see all of my smart objects that are here. Here's the blue line from my bounding box. Now I have flour 11a4, that's meant to be for a 33, a 2.5. So really I have five flowers, but I've repeated some of them to create this repeat. So I know that if I'm going to change the colors in this pattern, I need to change five of them, but I have 123-45-6789 layers plus my background to make ten. To make the color changes, I'm gonna go ahead and start with flower one. Come into my smart object layer. For this color change, I'm just going to use an adjustment from the adjustment menu. And I'm going to just make some changes. And I'm gonna change my flowers to more of this pink color. I see that it's negative 41 on the hue. And I'm gonna hit, Okay, then I'm going to save it. And we'll see flour 1.1 a change. Then. Let's just rename that. For. Now. I'm going to come to flower for a and I want a similar adjustments. So I'm going to come up to my adjustments and then my smart object layer. And I'm just going to now type negative 41. And it's gonna give me this sort of pink color that I'm going for with this repeat. Click that smart object layer close, and then 4.4 a will have changed. Now, next flower three. Same thing. Hue Saturation. Negative 41. And go ahead and save. And 3.3 a change now I just have to Touche and flour five, so two more changes to make. So let's double-click and we're going to do my adjustment. Command Hue brings up this dialogue, negative 41, okay. And close. One more to go. And that flower doesn't have any sort of copies. So it's just this one. And we're going to do you command to, sorry, Command U and bring up my dialog box and negative quoting one and hit. Okay, and there we go. Now those color changes, and I'm going to add a background. I think I'm gonna go for more of a dramatic and add this dark black background. I can also play around with the colors here, but we get the idea of how to then finalize your repeat pattern, which is your projects. So now if I come out of pattern, Pattern Preview, we're going to remember that all of my smart objects that are hanging off the end will not be visible. But I'm going to save this file as a master copy. So I'm gonna go to Save As bird of paradise master. And I know that my master copy or however you want to label your files, will be labeled. That that's my smart object layer. Or you can just play a role in smart objects or master of layers or whatever you think is appropriate that you'll remember and find the appropriate place in your files. But now I need to save a repeat tile that shows my motifs. So we're gonna go back into Pattern Preview to finalize these motifs. I have to go ahead and rasterize each layer, which is basically undoing the smart object. So Rasterize Layer, right-click Rasterize. Now when I come out of pattern preview, I can see all of my motifs on the edge. I can do a few things. I can save an additional copy that's still gives me the ability of having each one of these elements on their own layer. That's always a good practice. And that's probably what I would do if I were saving a using this file. Then an additional thing you can do is condense your layers into one layer. Merge visible. Now I have my motifs on one layer and my background on another layer. And I can play around with the black background color. I can edit all of these at the same time. And I can play with the saturation, maybe make it a little bit moodier. And say, I like this, I can go ahead and go to Save a Copy. And when I go to Save a Copy, I'm going to get this JPEG option. If I click, JPEG, is going to save a flattened file tile. I can also throw a pattern tile in here. I have a seamless repeat. And remember that the repeat tile that comes into this panel is a flattened file of that. Say I want to save it with just my flowers and apply this to another pattern. And I can do this well and save an additional one with a transparent background. And we can also apply different layers of patterns. So there's a lot of things that you can do here once you are getting your pattern ready to be a complete pattern that you're going to upload and use somewhere either in a pitch to a company or a print on-demand. Perhaps you're getting ready to load this to Spoonflower or society six or any of the other companies you might be working with. And those are just some ways to save your work. And I advise always saving some sort of edible or maximal edible copy and a flat file. The flat JPEG is going to have a lot less heaviness to it and the file will just be simpler to transport. You can save a tiff, you can save a JPEG, you can save a Photoshop file, lots of options. I can't wait to see what you make using Pattern Preview. 17. Lesson 15 Combing Patterns Together: An additional thought is to combine some of your patterns together. So since we've learned about using the pattern fill option here on the pattern swatches. And we've collected these swatches throughout the class. What I'd like to do is to take this little daisy flower here, and I'd like to add a polka dot background to it. So I have my file setup where the middle petals and stem are all on the correct layer. I want to add polka dots. And the key to adding pattern within pattern is making sure that the dimensions of your document, which is that blue bounding line, they're fit within each other or are divisible by each other. So I have a 12 inch by 12 inch document at 300 DPI. Check that here in age size. So here it's 12 " by 12 ", 300 pixels per inch. And I had made this little scattered dot pattern, which if we hover and leave our cursor over it, it tells us the dimensions, which was 1,200 by 1,200 pixels. So I know that that 1,200 by 1,200 pixels can be divided within the pixels of this box. So I'm gonna go up here and go to Fill. And I'm going to select this one and hit. Okay? And because the repeat of that fits within the bounding box and it's divisible by the outside. I have this repeat, this repeat now layered because I use the transparent polka dot. I can change the color of my background and the polka dots. So I can pixel lock this layer and pick a color that maybe goes with the artwork a little bit better or something that I'm trying to create. And change my dots. And then go ahead and pick background color to make those dots stand out and create a repeat pattern with two layers of pattern. So the top layer is my flowers and the bottom layer is my dots. They both have seamless repeats that fit into each other correctly into the outer layer. So let's come out. So that is the important thing about layering patterns. If you have two different dimensions and they aren't divisible by the outside of your document. The patterns will not line up. 18. PP Thank you: They use so much for taking the time to learn with me. I hope that you learned a lot. I hope you enjoyed this deep dive into using the pattern preview feature in Adobe Photoshop. I love using this feature. I use it all the time as well as some other additional methods to create seamless repeat patterns. I would love to see your work so please share your project in this class so that I can see it and others can follow along your journey. If you create a seamless repeat pattern with the pattern preview and you'd like me to see it on social media. You can always use the hashtag. Skillshare, Shots see brown. And this way I will be able to find your work and you can find me on Instagram at Schottky Brown. And also my portfolio site is under the same name. I can't wait to connect with you and thank you so much for learning with me.