Photoshop Workflows - Seamless Pattern Design

1. Introduction Pattern: Welcome to the most hands on photoshop course you've ever seen. This isn't your typical feature tour. We are diving straight into exciting creative projects, and you are encouraged to create completely unique designs. Pattern design is a very exciting and rewarding sector within the creative industry. And in this project, I'm going to show you various ways that you can approach creating a professional, seamless pattern. End result that we will be creating here can be applied to any product, apparel, or packaging, or even be used in digital format for a website or a mobile app. And at the end of the project, we will also visualize our work with this cool T shirt mockup. Whether you are an aspiring graphic designer, photographer, marketer, or simply an individual with a passion for visual storytelling, mastering photoshop provides you with the tools to bring your visions to life. This course is perfect for you if you are new to photoshop, or if you are self taught and a to get more confident and effective using it. I am Martin Purina, a certified Adobe expert and instructor with a design background spanning over two decades. Throughout my career, I collaborated with renowned clients such as Disney, Mattel, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, and BBC. Learn to use photoshops latest features together with the fundamental building blocks, like layers, adjustments, selections, transformations, masking, smart objects brushes and so much more. You can also future proof your skills by mastering Photoshop's amazing generative AI features. I am not just teaching photoshops. I am empowering you to express yourself, tell your story, and create designs that resonate with your unique style. This is your chance to create work that is truly personal and worthy of your professional creative portfolio. You can follow along with each project and replicate my designs, or you can use the workflows and techniques I show you and create something completely different and unique. So are you ready to revolutionize the way you learn photoshop? Your creative adventure with Photoshop starts right here. 2. Generating patterns with Adobe Firefly: We will approach this project in two different ways. The first method is going to be much faster because we mainly will rely on do B Firefly and an AI generated pattern. But then we will see how to use Photoshops pattern preview and manually put the elements of the pattern together, which will rely more on your creativity. Like with all the projects, I prepared lots of assets so you can really play around and explore things and have creative freedom to create your own unique design. So let's start in the desktop version of Photoshop first and create a new file. I'm going to use 1080 pills by 1080 Pis, and I'm going to use RGB color mode and a white background. This is going to be the blank document that I'm going to start working in. If you want, you can already generate something directly here in photoshop by selecting everything, going to the select menu and choose all. And then from the contextual Tas bar, you can choose generative fill. In case you don't see the tas bar, just make sure you go to the window menu and enable it. So if I choose generative fill, I can just type in something like floral pattern, maybe seamless floral pattern is going to help to make sure that it can actually work as a tile. And we will get three random results here. So this is the first one. Here's the second one, and here's the third one. Now, as you can see, it would already work as a pattern because the edges would line up. So it did a good job in that sense. And I actually quite like this one, and we will see how this works on a product mockup soon. But first, I would like to open up Adobe Firefly. In case this is the first time you use it. Open a browser and type in firefly adb do com. And here, go to the text to image option. When you click on Generate, you can just type in the same prompt, so we can type in seamless floral pattern, and then generate. Here, we will get four options to choose from. And also, we will have a lot of options on the right to refine the results. So we can see that it's quite different from what we've seen in photoshop, and that is mainly because currently, the Adobe Firefly website is using a more advanced model or engine. This is currently only available here as it says it here at the bottom. This is not the one that Adobe is using when you are using generative fiel right now. But by the time you are going through this course, that might be much newer versions both in photoshop and here. So it's just good to know that you might not have the same results, and currently, the Adobe Fire five website can generate better results. So we can refine this further. We can make it look more like a photo if we wanted to. But I actually prefer it to look like an art or illustration. And I'm going to go for this image here, so I'm just going to select that. And I will save this. So I go up to the more options, and I choose download. I'll jump back into Photoshop, and then from the file menu using Open. We can find this image and open it up as a separate document. There it is. We just open that one. And now in each of these documents, what you will need to do is to save them as patterns. So just go to the edit menu and choose define pattern. I'm not going to even change the name here. I will just hit and do the same with the other documents. So I go up to edit define pattern. Save it. Now that we have both of these ready. It's time to see how they would look like on an actual product like a T shirt. I have a file prepared in the exercise files folder called T shirt Mockup. So open that one up. And in this document, you will find a layer called Design here. That's the one that you will need to double click on. So the thumbnail of this layer is where you double click to access the actual layer, where you can apply your pattern. Notice how it already has a layer style called pattern overlay. This is what you need to again double click on. And within there, you will be able to change to the pattern that you just saved. I have both of these versions here, so there's one, and there's the other one. This one was the one that we created on the website. And actually, when I zoom closer, I can see some parts where it's not perfectly repeated, so there is a visible edge here. So that's clearly not good for a seamless pattern. But just to test it out, I'm going to reduce the size a bit of the pattern with the scale attribute. We could also change the angle on it if we wanted to. And then when I click okay, all I have to do now is to just save this. So go up to the file menu, save it. And then if we close this smart object layers document, We can see how it would look on the product itself. Now, from this distance, the edges are not noticeable. But of course, if this is something you want to actually print out and sell it as a product, you would want to make sure that the pattern itself is completely perfect, and there's no visible edges. But let's just go back to this layer again. Double click on it once more. Double click on the pattern overlay effect and change it to that other version that we created with in Photoshop. I'm just going to increase the scale on this a bit. This one seems to have no visible edges. Feel like this actually is really a seamless pattern, so I can keep it somewhere around there. Let's just turn it around a bit. Now, actually, I just noticed an edge here as well. If I zoom back, I can see right there. There is still a visible edge here. So it's still not 100%, slightly better, but maybe just because it's a little bit more abstract pattern. But as you can see, currently, both of these generative AI methods, whether you are using at OB FR five website, or you are using the feature directly within Photoshop, will have some minor issues around the edges. It's good to experiment with them still, but I would recommend to do the pattern manually, which I will show once we are done with this. Maybe I'll just increase the size a little bit more. So let's just save this again. I just use commando Control S to save the pattern quickly. And then closing that smart object document, we can see the MCU itself. Again, from this distance, it doesn't look that bad, but even here, I sort of can tell where the tiles are. So there is a visible edge right there, which would obviously show up in print. 3. Preparing assets for the pattern: The good thing is that we've already seen the whole workflow. So now we just concentrate on creating something ourselves instead of relying on AI. I would recommend to create another new document, and I prefer to work with a square format, but you can work with whatever suits you. This time, I'm going to make it slightly larger just so we have a little bit more resolution to work with. So 1,500 by 1,500 pixels, RGB color mode, and let's just create that. Once you have this ready, you can decide the theme of your pattern, depending on which assets you are going to choose from the exercise files folder. I'm going to go with the floral theme. So for this, I'm going to open the plants Illustration one and two images. So double click on these. They will open up in photoshop. And as you can see, these are nice watercolor illustrations of various floral designs. These are actually also created with AI, by the way. But that doesn't really matter in this case because they can be drawn by hand or digitally, or they could even be vector illustrations. But for this project, we will have to separate them from their original white background. So first of all, I am going to use the rectangular Market tool and make a selection of one of these details. Let's just start with this one right here. Once I selected it, I can just press command or Control C to copy this and then jump back to our blank document and then paste it in with commando Control V. There we have it. And if I use the move tool, I can already start moving this around within the document. Now we can separate this from its original background later. Now, I'm just going to keep it here. Let's jump back to that document and select one of these other ones. Maybe this bigger one here. Going to make the selection, and by the way, if you hold down the space bar while you are using the rectangular market tool, you will be able to make your selection more accurately. And once again, copy this and then paste it in the other document. So we have two of them, and then maybe let's pick something from this other document as well. This one is quite nice. I'm going to select that, copy it and paste it in here. Use the move tool to put it on top and choose at least five of these elements. I would recommend to have at least five of them. The more the better because you will have more variety. So there it is. And then maybe this one is quite nice as well. L et's copy that. Drop it in our untitled document, and then I'm going to choose one more, maybe this one. In case you have a selection where it overlaps one of the other details, you can just hold down the old key and highlight that area. That way is not going to copy that. You are removing from your selection. Don't forget to copy and then paste into the main document that we will be working with. Now, you can see as I'm moving these layers around, we have that white background showing up, which, of course, we don't want in the final composition. It just makes it harder to work with these layers, so they will always overlap each other. And the easiest way to spot which layers need to be extracted from their background is by creating a new layer at the bottom. You can even delete this background layer because we won't need it. Just select it and press backspace on the keyboard. Then click on the adjustments icon here at the bottom and choose solid color. So this is a special type of layer, and just pick any color for now, maybe a blue and make sure that this layer is placed all the way at the bottom. If you want to change the color of this layer, you can just double click on it and choose whichever color you prefer to work with. This is just to help us see which layers we still need to extract from their original white background. So I'm going to start with this layer right here. I'm using the Move tool and holding down the commando control key. I can click on layers to quickly switch between them. Or if you have the auto select feature turned on, this is a feature that will automatically work for you. So by default, photoshop is working like this. It will automatically switch between the layers. But if you don't want that to happen, make sure you turn this off, and then you will stick to always the layers you were working with unless you hold down the commando control key with the move tool to switch between the layers. So what I would like to do is to go in order. So let's start with this one here on the top left. That one is selected. I can use the contextual task bar and choose select subject. Most of the time it will do a good job. In this case, it didn't do a perfect job, so we can see that it's not aligned exactly to the illustration. So instead of this one, I am going to rely on another quick selection tool. This is actually called the magic wand, which is great for highlighting solid color backgrounds. In this case, the white background. So once you have the magic one tool selected, the tolerance of this tool can be adjusted here on the top. By default, it should be set to 32. And that actually is a quite good value to work with most of the time. And here it worked like a charm, so we can use that. And within the contextual task bar, you can click on this icon to invert your selection. And then click on the next icon to turn this selection into a mask. Once you've done that, you should see a very good extracted result from the original white background. And this is exactly what we will need to do on the other assets. But before we move on, I also would like to turn this layer into a smart object. So let's right click on it and choose convert to Smart object. This is going to allow us to work non destructively when we are applying a facts and resizing, rotating the layer. It is a good practice to remember to first do your masking, then save it as a smart object, and only then do transformations. So that should always be the steps. Masking smart object transformation. Let's do the same thing here. Once again, I'm going to use the Magic one tool, click on the background. And as you can see, it starts to pick up some details here in the middle because the contiguous option is turned off. That means it can actually jump over and even select highlights or bright details, even if it wasn't connected to the background. If I have the contiguous turn on and I click on the background, that means it will't be able to jump over these darker details, so it won't select those accidentally. So we actually don't need those details. We don't want them to be removed. So now I can invert my selection and then turn it into a mask, and that looks great. Right click, convert to Smart Object. Moving on to the next layer. We again, click on the background. And in this case, I can see a few areas like these here in the middle that should also be selected. And this is when the contiguous option can be turned off, so let's just test it again. If I now, click on the white background. You can see how it managed to go inside those isolated details as well, like here. But the problem is that some of these branches are a little bit too bright, so the magic one is actually selecting them as well, not just the background. So in this case, we can also reduce the tolerance, maybe down to 20. So let me try this selection again. First, I will go to the select menu and choose D select. Or you can press commando Control D. That way we can restart the selection. So I'm going to click again on the background. And I can still see it's starting to pick up some of these details here. So let me try with a lower tolerance. Maybe go down to 12. Now when I click, it looks already much better. So I think I'm going to stick with this one. I will again invert my selection, and then save this as a mask. And now we can save this as a smart object. So I will do that, and we have three of them ready to go. Let's continue with the next one. Once again, magic one, maybe a little bit higher tolerance is going to work here. So let's click on there. Take a closer look. We can keep contiguous on as well, but in this case, I don't think it was making any difference, and then invert the selection, save it as a mask. And then save the whole thing as a smart object. And we have two more to work with. Let's move this up a bit. Make sure always that you have the full layer within the canvas. So not on the edge because then it won't be able to select all the details. So right here, again, with the magic one, we managed to make that selection. And in case you notice that there are some isolated details like these, you don't have to restart the selection. You can just hold down the shift key and click on those. That's another way around it to create the selection. And then if you're happy with the result, just invert the selection and save it as a mask, and then turn it into a smart object. And finally, this one here. Again, magic one, click on it. There's no isolated details, so we can already invert it and save it as a mask. Actually, I noticed one additional part there. So before we save it as a mask, I'm just undoing this last step. I am going to use the magic one still, shift click on that area, then invert the selection and save it as a mask. Okay. That looks good. Now we can turn this into a smart object as well. 4. Creating seamless pattern: Now that we have these elements ready, it's time to create the composition for our pattern. And first of all, I'm going to change the background color to white. I think that's going to work better for this. But because now we extracted all the images, we can easily even overlap them on top of each other. And generally, I'm going to make them all slightly bigger, so I select them all and make them bigger, and there is an amazing feature that we will be using here in Photoshop called Pattern Preview. This will help us to be able to create something where we want notice the edges in the final design. So if you go to the view menu, choose pattern preview. And then immediately, we can see the current design. But when I start moving elements around, notice how it already creates the repeated details. The additional instances that are needed are visible outside of this tile, the square that we have in the middle. If I zoom further back, you can actually see that it's an unlimited canvas, so you can see exactly how the pattern would look from a distance or how it would look close up. Going to work closer, so I just zoom the back, and I'm going to quickly move these objects around using the free transform tool that's command or Control T. We can rotate them around. Just press enter when you are happy with the position of a transformation. I'm going to move this one up a bit. These ones, I actually like a bit of overlap. So I quite like the way that looks. Maybe we can turn this around a bit. Like that. This can have a bit of an overlap as well. We can maybe make this slightly bigger. So I just keep going back and forth in the free transform tool. We can maybe turn it around. We can also flip these elements around in the edit menu, transform flip horizontal or vertical. This case, I just wanted a horizontal flip like that. I feel like that looks quite nice. I can bring that one up here, and then I can maybe turn this one around as well. Just so they are not in the same orientation. Then I want to make these two layers bigger. So I will start with this one first, fill out that space a bit more here then select the other one and also increase it in size. Yeah, something like that. Let's make this one also a bit bigger. And if there is more overlap there, that's actually going to make it more interesting. Right there. And then this one can also overlap. And now you can see why it was so important to have no backgrounds on these assets. And in case you want to bring one of these designs in front of the others. So for instance, this one, if I want it to be in front of the other leaves, all I have to do is to just simply move it up in the layer spanel until it comes in front. And I think this was actually probably better behind. So I'm going to drop it back there and maybe just turn it around a bit. Something like that. Now, besides having these larger elements, it's always good to have some smaller filler details within a pattern. For that, I'm going to use an empty new layer. I will actually call this fillers. On this layer, I will use the brush tool. With the brush tool selected, I'm going to sample a color from the existing design by holding down the altar option key and clicking somewhere like here. When you're using the sampling shortcut, you are temporarily accessing the eye dropper tool. And by the way, if you hold down the altar option key and click and drag, you can even see a preview of the colors that you are hovering over. So I can find maybe something nice like this color here I quite like. And I'm actually going to use a special brush for this technique called Kyle's ultimate charcoal pencil. It's within the dry media brushes category. You should be able to find it here. In case you want to find additional brushes, you can go into the settings and choose get more brushes. You can download these for free. But this should be there by default. So I'm going to work with that one. And I'm actually going to use my stylus. But of course, you can do this with your mouse as well, whichever is easier. I will zoom a little bit closer, make the brush smaller. And I would like to draw something simple, so I'm going to just draw a leaf. And another leaf, something like that. Yeah, there's one design there. Then I'm going to go here. I will do like little berries or something like that. Again, I'm trying to make it similar to the rest of the design. Then I come up here, maybe do a bigger leaf, like that. And by the way, these are all on the same layer right now. So it might be easier if you do everything on separate layers, that way you can move them around. So for instance, now, if I use the move tool, they are all moving together. But if I wanted to, I could make a quick rectangular marke selection around this leaf and use the shortcut command or control shift J. That way, I can put this on its separate layer. So it's cut from the original layer and paste into a new layer. The shortcut that I used, you can find in the layer spanel, and it's the new layer via cut option that you can find here. Now let's just draw a few more elements. And before I draw it, I create a new layer just so it's isolated. Let's just fill this part here in a bit as well. I'm going to do something similar to what I've done earlier on. Just create another branch, like that. Maybe move it down a bit. And then let's draw something again on another new layer. I will draw an acorn this time. Just to go with the style or theme of shading on it like that. Of course, we could also vary the colors of these little scribbles. Maybe I will use something more of this yellow color on another new layer. Again, create something very simple like leaf. We can move it down a bit, maybe extend the stem. And so on and so forth. Maybe just one final detail with this color. I'm going to add just a few more berries here at the bottom. Yeah, something like that. All right. So now that we have this ready, it's time to turn this into a pattern. Simply go to the edit menu and choose define pattern. You can give it a name or just keep whatever it's called by default. And once you click, it will be ready to be used on any of your documents. So we can go back to that mockup that we created earlier. I will double click on that thumbnail that we used and also double click on the pattern overlay effect. And here we should be able to switch to our latest custom design that we created, where there shouldn't be any issues with the edges, so it should be a really seamless design. We can adjust the angle maybe on this a bit. Yeah, I feel like that looks good. The scale can be reduced, and then once we click and save this, we can see how it would look on the actual T shirt. And I'm quite happy with this result. It's actually something I would be happy to wear. And I'm sure your design looks just as good or better. And don't forget there's a lot of variation that you can do for this project. Lots of assets I prepared. So feel free to explore them, both the elements and both the various options that you have to add smaller details between the larger ones, and really just experiment and have fun before you move on to the next project. 5. Conclusion: Well done for finishing this course. I hope you had just as much fun going through it as I had recording it. And of course, don't forget about the class project. Because remember, practice makes perfect. I can't wait to see your work, so make sure to submit it. And in case you like this course, and you would like to learn more from me, then there's plenty of other courses that you can find here. Go ahead check them out now. I can't wait to meet you in the next one.