Seamless Repeating Patterns in Adobe Photoshop - Just the Basics - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Pattern Making in Photoshop 101 Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, creating patterns in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications, such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today, we're looking at the very basics of creating patterns in Photoshop. This is a Photoshop one class. We're going to start from the very beginning and discuss how we would make patterns in Photoshop, and then we're going to fill a shape with a pattern. If you've never made patterns in Photoshop before, this class is for you. If you're ready now, let's get started. 2. Pattern Making Part 1: To create our pattern, I'm just going to choose File and then New and I'm going to create a document of a known size. I'm choosing 100 pixels wide by 100 pixels high. I'm in RGB color mode and it's going to be transparent. I'll just click "OK". I'm going to just zoom in here using the Zoom Tool so I can make my shape a lot bigger so I can see it clearly. This process that we're going to do, you can do in practically any version of Photoshop. This has been able to be done for years. I'm going to select a different color, I'm going off to my swatches here. If you don't have your swatches appearing here, you can just go to Window and then choose Swatches. I'm just going to choose a color for my star because we're going to draw a star. I'm thinking a nice yellow color is a good option. I'm going to click here on the Rectangle Tool, and I want the Polygon Tool because that's going to let me draw out my star, so I'll click on that. Up here I need to select pixels from this drop-down list. Now in earlier versions of Photoshop, you might have three icons there from which you will select the pixels option. Now, here I get to choose how many sides, and I already have typed five in, so I'm just going to retype that. We're going to have a five-sided star or five-pointed star. Then I'm going to click on this gear icon and I get to choose star because I want it to be a star. I can choose how far the sides are indented by, and I've just typed 60 percent, I can leave the radius blank and just draw it out myself. I'm just going to click away from this. Now I've got my foreground color selected, I'm just going to drag to create my star. I'm going to straighten it up a little bit, and because it's way off the workspace here, I'm just going to hold the Spacebar to move it into position. Now, we're going to make sure it's dead center in just a minute. Right now all I'm looking at is trying to make it look upright. When I'm ready, I'll just let go of the left mouse button. Let's go to the Layers palette and see what we've got. We've got one transparent layer with a star in the middle of it. Now we're ready to create our pattern, but make sure everything's centered first. Now I've got smart guides turned on. You can see here that I'm snapping to my guides and I have Snap turned on. When I move this directly into the middle of the document, I should have smart guides that are going to tell me that it's nicely centered. Now the horizontal ones don't seem to be working for me. If I want to align this to the very center of the document, here is how I'll do it. To make sure that this is aligned centrally on the Canvas, I'm going to select everything, so I'll choose, Select, All. Now you'll see that the center options become available. I'm just going to click on Vertical and Horizontal Align Center just to make sure it's perfectly aligned in the center of the document. We're ready now to go ahead and to create our pattern. We'll do this by re-choosing Select, All, because I want to make sure that everything is selected here. Then Edit, Define pattern. I'm going to call it star. Then just click "OK". We've now got a star pattern. It's a yellow star on a transparent background. Now the importance of putting this on a transparent background is going to be apparent when we go and create our star pattern. Because we've included transparency, we'll be able to add whatever background color we want at the time. It's making our pattern a whole lot more flexible than if, for example, it was a yellow star on a white background. Let's move forward and let's see how we would create a document and fill it with our pattern. 3. Pattern Making Part 2: Having created my pattern swatch, I no longer need this document. For now I'm just going to get rid of this, and will create a new one later on to create a different pattern. We're going to create a document that we're going to fill with the pattern. We want it to be quite large. For example, if you were designing scrapbook paper, you might want this to be 3,600 pixels by 3,600 pixels, printing at a resolution of 300 pixels per inch. Again, RGB color, I'm going to set the background contents. Well, let's set it to white, so that we'll have yellow stars on a white background and I'll click "Okay." In our last palette, you can see that we have a background here now, with a white fill. I'm going to add a new layer because whenever I put my patterns in on a new layer, I get a little bit more flexibility, by separating the stars, for example, from the white background. There are a couple of options in particular that we could use to fill this document with our pattern. I'm going to show you the one, that is perhaps most used, first of all, and tell you why I don't think it's your best choice. I'll choose "Edit" and then "Fill." Here from the contents drop-down list, I'm going to select "Pattern." Then we'll go to the Custom Patterns, so we're going to select the very last pattern, because your patent is always going to be the very last one here. I'm clicking on it. I'm just going to click "Okay." Now, one of the reasons why I don't particularly like this pattern fill option is that we get the pattern filled at 100 percent, but we really don't get a lot of options for rescaling the pattern once it's in there. I don't think this is the world's best choice. Let's get rid of this and let's have a look and see, the way that I think is a better option. I'll choose "Layer," "New Fill Layer," "Pattern." Now there are a couple of reasons for this. I'm just going to click "Okay" at this point. One of them is that this pattern fill option always default to the last pattern that you created. Instead of having to go looking for your pattern, this is always going to default to the pattern that you just made. The other thing is you've got a scale here. This pattern's looking really small to me right now, so I'm going to increase it to 250 percent. You can see now that it's a much larger pattern fill. That's why I like this option for filling the document with a pattern. Of course, we've got a fill layer. If at any time we needed to rasterize this, we can just right-click on the layer, and choose "Rasterize Layer," and then it will be converted to just a regular layer, which is always the little yellow stars on it. Now the reason why I suggest that you separate the pattern from the fill then, is that you could fill this layer with a different color. Let's go and get a dark blue. Well, that's probably a little bit dark, let's go for this color, and let's go back to our layers palette. I'm selecting the background layer. I'm just going to click on this to unlock it. I'm going to fill it with my blue color. I can do that a number of ways. One way is just to dump it in there with a Paint Bucket Tool. I'll go and get the Paint Bucket Tool and dump my blue color in there. By separating the pattern from its background, you can see that we have ultimate flexibility in recoloring the background. But, of course, we can also recolor the pattern. I'm going to select the pattern layer this time. I'm going to choose "Layer," "New Adjustment Layer," Hue/Saturation." Again, I'll click "Okay." Now this option in the most recent versions of Photoshop, you can actually clip this. What I can do is clip this adjustment so that it only affects the layer below, and that's the yellow layer. The blue is not going to change, but the yellow is. I'll show you in a minute how you can do this on earlier versions of Photoshop. right now what you want to concentrate on, is just the yellow color and finding an alternative color for it. I'll click "Colorize." Now I can drag on the hue slider, to change the color. If I increase the saturation, you'll see the color coming through. Let's just travel it around. You can see that we can change that yellow star, to be a different color star. Let's make it pale blue. I can increase my saturation, and I can also adjust my lightness here. When I'm done, I'm just going to close this panel. Let's go back to the last palette. We've got the dark blue color here, we've got our yellow stars, and we've got a clipped hue saturation adjustment layer that right now is only affecting this layer here. Now if you're working on earlier versions of Photoshop, you may not have that clipping tool. I'm just going to unclip this and show you how you clip it. If this is what you get from applying the hue saturation adjustment to this image, and you like this color but you don't want to affect the navy blue, you'll select the "Hue/Saturation" adjustment layer, and then you'll choose "Layer," "Create Clipping Mask." What that does is it just clips this adjustment so it only affects the layer immediately below. You can also do this with the keyboard. If I hold the Ctrl and Alt keys, that's Command Option on the Mac, and hover over the junction between these two layers, you'll see I get that little indicator. If I click here, I can turn this clipping mask on and off. That has worked in a lot of versions of Photoshop. That's going to work in your version very easily. There's our first pattern, that's a very simple pattern, and we've learned how to recolor it. We're going on next to create a multi-color pattern, and one that has a little bit more interesting design. 4. Pattern Making Part 3: For our next pattern, we're going back to create another small document File, New, and we're going to make this 100 pixels by 100 pixels. What's important here is not the size so much as knowing how big it is because we're going to use these dimensions in a minute to create our pattern. Again, I'm going to choose transparent background, so that gives me more flexibility with my pattern and I'll click "Okay". Again, very small document, I'm going to zoom into it and this time let's create a heart pattern. I'm going to the custom shapes option here, so I'm going to choose the Custom Shape Tool. Up here on the shapes menu, I can go and select a heart shape. This heart is built into Photoshop and so too is this one. If you don't see all these shapes, you can just click here on the ''Fly-out'' menu and there's an option to select all. You can click "All" and then just append the shapes and that will append them or you can just go and select a particular type of shape and append those. If you choose to append shapes, you'll find that they just added to the end and so any custom shapes that you might have created won't be overwritten in the process. I'm going to choose this heart here. I want to fill it. I'm going to choose pixels again, but this time I want to use a heart color, so I want a nice pink, so we create a pink. I'm just going to hold the Shift key as I drag out a heart. Hold the Space bar just to move it into position. Again, I'm probably going to have trouble finding the middle. No, this time I'm able to find the middle. I'm just using the smart guides holding the space bar down as I draw it to position it in the very middle, let go of the left mouse button and then let go of the space bar and the Shift key. If I didn't get that directly centered, I would just choose ''Select All'' and then with the move tool here, you'll find that the center keys are available here and you can just use them to adjust the centering of this object. Now we've got a heart shape, what we want to do this time is to create a slightly more sophisticated shape. I'm going to duplicate this layer, I'll drag it and drop it on the new layer icon. I've got two copies of the heart and this one I'm going to break up and throw into the corners here and that's going to create this more sophisticated pattern. With this layer selected, I'll choose ''Filter'', ''Other'', ''Offset''. That's an important thing to remember Filter, Other, and then Offset. This is where we need to know the values that we set for the size of this document because we're going to offset this by half of the width and height. The width was a hundred, so we're selecting 50 for our horizontal and the height was a hundred so we'll type 50 for the vertical, that's just half of the width and height. This is exactly what we're looking for so the preview is showing us that everything's working fine and I'll click "Okay". This is my pattern paste, but while we're here, let's just make an additional change to this. I'm going to make this pink heart a different color pink. I'll just go ahead and select it by control-clicking on the heart in this layer. You can see that it's selected and I'm going to go and find a different pink for it, a much paler pink. With this selected, I'll press ''Alt'' ''Backspace'' option Delete on the Mac because it's the foreground color. Alt, Backspace option, Delete will fill the selection with the current foreground color. Now we're ready to create our pattern swatch again and we'll choose, Select All. That's important because we want to select everything, not just the middle heart, and then go to Edit, Define Pattern. We're going to call this hearts and click "Okay". Now let's go and use it. We'll choose File and then New and create a much larger document to use it with. Let's assume that we have, for example, creating scrapbook paper and 3,600 by 3,600 pixels at 300 pixels per inch is perfect, transparent background and click "Okay". We'll fill this with our heart pattern Layer, New Fill Layer, Pattern, I'll click "Okay". You can see that the heart pattern is the one you used. It's the most recent pattern, is always the one that's applied using this pattern fill, which is why I like this option so much better than the other. I want to scale this up, so I'm going to size it up to 200 percent and click "Okay". Now we don't have a background in here yet, so I'm just going to control-click on the New Layer icon, Command-click on the Mac, and that just adds a new layer immediately below the existing layer. Because white is my background color, Control Backspace, command Delete on the Mac, we'll fill this layer with the current background color, which of course is white and there is our more sophisticated pattern. This is an offset pattern and it's been created using this pattern piece. Where we've got something in the center and we've thrown the second version of the object out to the corners here, broken it up, and thrown it out to the corners so that we end up with this way more sophisticated pattern. 5. Pattern Making Part 4: Before we finish up, let's answer the question of what happens if we want our heart-shaped pattern to be inside, for example, a heart instead of just filling an entire document? Well, I'm going to merge all of these layers together, so I just have a single layer in the document. I can right-click here and choose "Merge Down". Now, we have a single layer with the pattern in it that we want to use to fill our heart. I'm going to create a new layer here, and I'm going to select my heart. I'm making sure I'm going to "Custom Shapes", and I'm selecting my heart shape here. I'm clicking on this, and I'm ready to draw. I've got pixel selected here. If you're using an earlier version of Photoshop, you'll have to select perhaps an icon here. It doesn't matter what color you are using for your heart, it can be anything. I'm just going to drag out my heart shape and I'm just going to move it into the center here by holding down the "Space bar" so I can move the shape while I'm still drawing it. Then I'll let go the left mouse button. Now, I have a heart on top of my pattern. This layers are now the wrong way around. I'm going to move my heart below my pattern. I'm just going to drag and drop it there, and we're going to use that same clipping layer process that we used to clip the hue saturation adjustment. But this time we're going to clip the pattern to the shape of the heart below. We already know that we can choose "Layer", "Create Clipping Mask", and when we do, we're clipping the pattern here to the shape of the object immediately below it, which is our heart pattern. To finish off, let's just place a color filled layer below everything so we can see it a little more clearly. "Control" or "Command" click on the "New Layer" icon, to move the new layer immediately below all the other layers. Then we'll go and choose a very pale pink color. This is going to be our fill color, and now with this layer selected, I'm just going to click the "Move Tool" so I have access to this command, or backspace option, delete to fill this layer with the pale pink color. If we wanted something a little bit extra to finish off, we could add a drop shadow to this heart to separate it from its background. I'll click the "fx" icon, click "Drop Shadow", and I'll just drag out a very shallow drop shadow around my shape. I'm going to decrease the opacity, so it's very subtle and click "Okay". There you have a heart shape filled with a heart-shaped pattern created in Photoshop. Your project for this class will be to create a shape and to fill it with a pattern of your own making. If you enjoyed this class, please give it a thumbs up so that other people will know that it's the class worth taking and feel free to include some comments as I always like to hear what you think of the classes. My name is 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. 6. Bonus Video Pattern Making anti aliasing: This is a short additional video for the Graphic Design for Lunch, Make a Pattern in Photoshop class. I just want to go over briefly the concept of anti-aliasing. I have a document here that has a filled layer in it, and I'm going to add a new layer. I have a pink color selected. I'm going to select the custom shapes tool here. I'm going to create this heart-shaped that I used in the video, and I have it set to pixels. I'm going to turn anti-alias off this first time. I'm just going to drag out my heart shape. I'm going to go and do exactly the same thing. But this time, I'm going to change color. I'll turn anti-alias on, we're in pixel mode again. I'm just going to drag to create my heart. Now let's go back to the heart that I created when anti-aliasing was turned off. I'm going to zoom in really close to the edge of this heart. You can see that it's very pixelated. You can see very clearly the edges of the heart and they're all the same shade of pink. Well, let's turn this layer off, and let's have a look at the edge in the heart that I created when I had anti-aliasing turned on. If we zoom in here, you'll see that the edge of this heart has multiple colors in it. There's the turquoise color, but then there's some sort colors that all trend towards white. Well, they look like they trend towards white, but they don't actually do that. If I turn off the white background, you'll just see that they're semi-transparent pixels. They would allow this shape to blend into a white background, but it would easily also blend in with the black background. I've just turned my foreground color into black. I'm going to click on this layer and Alt Backspace, Option Delete, to fill this layer. You can see this feathering on the edge of the heart that allows it to transition into any background. When you're drawing shapes in Photoshop, most of the time, you'll want this even edge. When a choice can be made between using anti-alias or not, you would generally choose to use anti-alias so that you get the softer edge effect with that transition at the edge, which avoids a very pixelated edge in your image.