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This week I want to talk about taking your
favorite patterns and saving them to the patterns palette that
you can use anytime with any PSD. First we need to talk a little
bit about how to make patterns.
Last week we went over the new pattern feature
in Photoshop 6. You might want to jump over there first to brush
up.
The art of making patterns and textures takes
some practice. With time and patience you can create some great
effects. Here is the key to great textures and patterns...
experimentation. Seriously, try out anything and everything you
can think of. There is no stopping you from running 100 filters
on a document, so try it and be the next guru. Of course you can
create some great geometric shapes, stars, circles, green
clovers, blue diamonds and other such tasty breakfast patterns,
but you can also do so much more. Take the following example.
Last week I was playing around with taking samples of scanned
photos and using them in my patterns pallette. I found this
sample of carbon fiber material and made a pattern out of it.
I zoomed in to the photo really close to see
what the pixels looked like, and used the marquee tool to select
a portion of the photo, that when tiled, would look perfectly
accurate to the original. Then I hit Edit -> Define Pattern.
Once that was done, the pattern was in my palette and I can use
it whenever I want now. Wait, let's go over that again.
Step-by-Step
1. Have an entire image that you want to make into a pattern, or
using the rectangular marquee tool, select the portion of an
image that you want to use as a pattern.
2. In the toolbar at the top of your photoshop
window or screen, hit Edit -> Define Pattern.
3. Now with the paint bucket tool selected and
the pattern option selected at the top toolbar, simply pick your
new pattern in the palette.
4. With the paint bucket tool, click on the
canvas area and the pattern will appear like magic. It's really
not magic though.
Ok, now that we have gone over that, let's talk
about some types of patterns that are actually useful. I like to
make patterns that are based on geometric shapes, like green
clovers and blue diamonds, in my channels palette. They aren't
green or blue in the channels palette though. I create a new
channel (alpha) and inside it I create the shapes. Using the
marquee tool and some serious zooming in, I create a rectangle
around the part of the image I want to be my pattern. Then I
define it as I did above. I create another new channel, and with
nothing selected on the canvas, I use the paint bucket tool to
fill it up. I have an example of this on my site at
jlswebsource.com tutorials. In my example I used a hexagon
pattern to create a small pattern shape.
When done, the paint bucket tool will tile my
pattern making and endless grid of hexagons. You can do the same
thing for lines, square grids, circles, squares and of course...
rock hard marshmallow shapes. Why is it useful you say? Well the
advantage is that when you select the transparency of the alpha
channel (Command/Control for PC and click on thumbnail image in
channels palette), it only selects the white portion. This
allows you to use this selection, create a new layer in your
layers palette, and fill it with any color you want. You are not
commited to any particular color as you would be if you created
the pattern on a layer.
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