Patterns as Photo Overlays for Social Media in Adobe Photoshop - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Pattern Overlays for Images in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch Class, Patterns as Photo Overlays in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at a series of patterns that you can use as overlays for photos. One of these is a rather attractive mosaic effect that you create using a pattern and mosaic tiles. As you're watching these videos, you will see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up, and secondly, write in just a few words why you're enjoying this class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question for me, please do so. I read and I respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at, and I respond to all of your class projects. Now, if you're ready, let's get started making pattern overlays for photos. 2. Pt 1 - TV Scan Lines: The first of our pattern over photo effects is going to be a series of TV scan lines. I've got this image that I've downloaded from unspliced.com that I'm going to use, but of course we need to create our pattern. I'll choose File and then New. I'm going to make a document that's a 100 pixels wide by a 100 pixels tall, so it's just a square document, and it's going to be transparent. I'll click "Okay." I'll zoom in so I can see the document really clearly. Then I'm going to make a selection over the top portion of the document. At this point, what I'm doing is making some determination as to how far apart my scan lines are going to be and how thick they are going to be. I'm going to make a selection that is about a quarter of the way through this document, so that my scan line is going to be quite narrow in comparison to the gap in the pattern. I've got black as my foreground color, so I'll press Alt Backspace on the PC, Option Delete on the Mac, and then I'll press Ctrl or Command D to deselect the selection. This is going to be my pattern. I'll choose Select All and then Edit Define Pattern, and I can call this scan line, and I'll click "Okay." If I'm not a 100 percent sure about the spacing of my line, I would keep this document here and I would go back to the bird images that we're going to put the scan lines on. I'll choose Layer, New Fill Layer, Pattern, I'll click "Okay." Now the pattern fill layer defaults to the last pattern that I created, which of course was my scan lines. Now I'm pretty happy with the relationship between the width of the line and the space, but the pattern itself is way too big for this image. So I'm going to decrease its size to 50 percent and see how that looks. Well, I still think it's a bit big, so I'm going to choose 30 percent and click "Okay." These are my TV scan lines over my image and I can now adjust the pattern to suite. For example, I may want to reduce the opacity so that it's a little less obvious, or I could leave the opacity where it is and choose a different blend mode, such as overlay or soft light. There are a number of different ways that I can adjust the look of the patter on the image, even though it was a black and white pattern, it doesn't have to stay looking like that. Of course, if I want the scan lines to be even closer together, I'll just double-click on the Pattern Fill and I'll change it now to 15 percent and see how that looks and click "Okay." 3. Pt 2 - Square and Grid patterns: On this image, we're going to look at a couple of simple patterns that are going to produce an interesting effect. I'll choose File and then New, and I'm going to create a document, a 100 pixels by a 100 pixels in size, transparent background. I'll click "Okay". I'm going to zoom in using the Zoom tool. I'm going to select the rectangular marquee tool and just drag out a small square. I'm going to do that by holding the shift key as I do, and then because black is my foreground color, I'll press "Alt backspace" option "Delete" on the mac, to fill my square with black. I need to deselect my selection, which I'll do by pressing "Control" or "Command D". It doesn't matter that my square is not centered nicely inside this document, it's going to make just a fine pattern, however it's placed. I'm going to choose "Select All" and then Edit, Define Pattern. I'm going to call this Square, and click "Okay". Let's go back to the image that I had opened ready for this pattern and I'll choose Layer, New Fill Layer, Pattern, and click "Okay", and of course, Photoshop is defaulting to the last pattern that I created, which is this small square pattern that's providing an interesting overlay over this snow image. I'll click "Okay". At this point, I can adjust the pattern in a number of ways. I could reduce the opacity of it so it becomes a very subtle overlay effect. I could obviously make it a lot smaller by double-clicking on the pattern thumbnail and then reduce the size of it to say 50 percent. I could also blend it in using blend modes such as overlay or soft light. While we're here with this image, we're going to create a second pattern for it. Again, File, New, a 100 pixels by a 100 pixels, and click "Okay". I'm going to zoom in, and we're going to create a very simple grid pattern. I am going to the rectangular marquee tool, and I'm just going to come in here 10 pixels. I'm looking at the width that Photoshop is telling me, and it's telling me that this is 10 pixels wide, so that's just fine. I'll press "Alt backspace" option "Delete" to fill that selection with black. Now I'm going to do the same thing in the other direction, and again, look for a height this time of 10 pixels. Again, I'll fill out with black, and then they select the selection. All you need for this pattern is two sides of this document to be covered in a single line of pixels. This L-shaped pattern is going to be perfect. I'll choose Select All and then Edit, Define Pattern, and this is going to make a square grid pattern, and I'll click "Okay". Now let's go back to our document. I'm going to make the layer visible here, the pattern layer, and I'm going to double-click on it, and what I can do is drop down this pattern selection list, and the last pattern in the list is going to be the one that I just created. Here it is, here. I'll click on it and click "Okay". Now, this already has the overlay blend mode applied to it, because I had that applied to the previous pattern. It also has a 100 percent opacity. It's disappearing in these very white areas of the image, because of the overlay blend mode. If we set it to normal then it would appear over the top of the image as you've seen here. But overlay is a really nice, interesting effect for this particular pattern. I'm just going to drop down the opacity a little bit. We're getting almost the impression of looking at this scene through a mesh. There are a couple of interesting pattern effects, that you can use over photos, that are quick and easy to create. 4. Pt 3 - Make a Photo into a Mosaic: For this next pattern, overlay effect I suggest that you start with an image that's pretty colorful and also has a really obvious subject, because we're going to turn this into a mosaic tile. Before we start, I'm going to crop away any part of this image that I don't actually want. I'm just going to clear out this crop setting that I had, and I'm going to crop it so that it's pretty close around this macaw's head. The next thing I need to do is to check on the size of this image, I'm going to choose Image and then Image Size. I can either adapt my pattern to the image size or I can adapt my image to the pattern, and I'm going to do the latter. I'm going to change my image size to work with my pattern. For my pattern, I'm going to make it to about 50 pixels square, and I want it to be located in an exact position over this image. What I want is for the image width and height to be multiples of 50 pixels. If I take this down to say 2,000 pixels, the width is really good but the height is not. But I'm not worried about that because I'm going to deal with the height in just a minute, but what I do want to know is roughly what the height is because I'm going to need to adjust that. I've got an image that's 2,000 pixels by 1,783. I'll click "Okay". I'm going back for the crop tool. I still want my image to be 2,000 pixels wide, I'm going to type in here 2,000 pixels. But I want the height to be less because I want to crop off a bit of extra. I'm going to make it 1,700 pixels, and that's taken a little bit off the top and the bottom, but it's given me a width and a height both values of which are evenly divisible by 50. If I divide 2,000 by 50, or if I divide 1,700 by 50, 50 is going to divide into these evenly with no remainder. That's the critical bit, I'll click the check mark. Next up, I'm going to make my picture a mosaic. I'm going to make a duplicate of this background layer, and because I'm going to be applying a filter to it, I'm going to convert this for smart filters. Filter, Converts for Smart Filters, and click "Okay". I'm going to apply my filter with Filter, Pixelate Mosaic. For the mosaic filter, what I'm going to do is set my cell size to the 50 pixels that I'm going to be working on in terms of a pattern size. I'm typing in here 50, and I'll just click "Okay". Now, we have our picture turned into a mosaic, and what we need next is the pattern to go over the top of it. 5. Pt 4 - Make the Circular See Through Pattern: To create our pattern, we're going to choose "File" and then "New". I'm going to make a document 50 pixels wide and 50 pixels tall, and it's going to have a transparent background, I'll click "Okay". I'm going to zoom in so I can see the document really clearly on the screen. I'm going to draw a circle using the Elliptical Marquee tool. I'm going to click in a position just slightly in from the top-left corner of the document, and I'll hold the Shift key so they constrain this to a perfect circle. I'm looking to create this circle write in the middle of the document. If I have trouble doing so, I'm going to add the space bar and just move the circle around until I get the smart guides showing me that I'm in the very middle of the document. I've got it now, so I'm going to let go the left mouse button and then let go the space bar and the Shift key. I have a circle here centered right in the middle of the document but it's not the circle that I want, it's a bit around the edge so I'm going to invert my selection with "Select Inverse". Now, I have selected the area around the edge of the circle, I'm selecting my layer here, white is my background color, so I'll press Control backspace command Delete on the Mac to fill my outside area with white. I'm going to press Control or Command D to deselect my selection. This is my pattern paste, so I'm going to choose "Edit", "Define Pattern". I'm going to call this circle and I'll click "Okay". Now, I don't need this pattern paste any longer, so I can just delete it. Back in this image I'm gonna click on the topmost layer because I'm going to add my pattern over the top. I'll do that by selecting "Layer", "New Fill Layer", "Pattern", and I'll click "Okay". The pattern that is added to the image is the very last pattern that I created and so that's the one that we want to use and it's scaled at 100 percent and that's exactly the way it should be and I'll click "Okay". There is my pattern overlay effect, but say I look at this now and I think that in actual fact it would be better if it was half the size. Well, we can easily solve that problem because of the way that we set up this document. First of all, let's go and make the pattern half the size. I'm going to double-click on the thumbnail here and I'm going to scale my pattern to 50 percent, and I'll click "Okay". Now well, that pattern looks pretty good over the mosaic. The mosaic is actually a whole lot coarser than it really needs to be. I'm going to go back to my mosaic filter at this point and instead of a sell size of 50, I'm going to make it 25, half of what it was before, and I'll click "Okay". We now have this editable effects that we've created with a patent over our image. If the white is too light, you can just adjust the opacity of it down so that you can seen more of the image underneath. I'm going to take it back up to 100 percent because we may want two look at this point as to what the image would look like if the pattern were black. Well, there's an easy way of converting white to black and that is invert. I'm going to choose "Layer", "New Adjustment Layer", "Invert", I'll click "Okay". The invert adjustment layer has inverted my pattern but it also inverted my bird. But there's an icon here that allows me to limit the inversion to only the layer immediately below the layer that has the patent on it. I'm going to click here. Here is our patent of the image effect this time with a black pattern rather than a white pattern. We haven't had to re-create the pattern because all we did was invert its color. It's also possible to use a hue saturation adjustment on the pattern and we're just going to turn off my invert layer for a minute and let's go and get a hue saturation adjustment layer. "Layer", "New Adjustment Layer", "Hue Saturation", and I'll click "Okay". Again, this one needs to be clips so that it affects only the pattern and not the bird as well. Now I can click "Colorize", I'm going to increase my saturation, decrease my lightness, and start working on finding a hue that's going to look good was my bird. I'm going to use a yellowy orange, but I'm going to increase the saturation here and also decrease the lightness. You can see this effect with a colorized adjustment layer is now affecting the pattern over the bird. We have plenty of options here for creating our pattern over our image and we've also created it so that it can be easily scaled differently the mosaic can be re-scaled and so two kinds of pattern. 6. Project and wrapup: Your project for this class will be to take a photograph, either one of the ones that I've used or a photograph of your choice, and to create a pattern overlay for it, and you can choose any of the designs that we've done in this class. Post a picture of your photograph with its pattern overlay as your class project. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned something about creating pattern overlays for images in Photoshop. As you're watching these videos, you'll see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up and secondly, write just a few words about why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students at Skillshare to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and I respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.