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Hello one and all, and welcome to my very first
column. Before I get started on the first delicious morsel of
information, I would like to tell you all a little bit about
what you can expect from my weekly column. Aside from the
obvious, which is information about Photoshop (I hope is always
great), you should also expect a few additional things.
I will occasionally talk about things such as
third party software packages, easy tutorials, advanced
tutorials and aspects of the finer points of Photoshop. But
since my experience is mainly in web design, I will be using
that experience to teachyou more about how to use Photoshop to
make your web sites look better. In addition, I will undoubtedly
talk a lot about particular design techniques that you should be
thinking about while using Photoshop. Some of these may be
industry standards and others will be my personal opinions. You
can of course take or leave my personal opinions and mild
editorials... if applicable.
My focus is really to make Photoshop fun and
part of your artistic tool kit. For some of you, Photoshop is
still a mystery. For others, it has become a part of your
everyday existence. I hope to appeal in some sense to all of
you. I will always try to make the difficult easy... because
that's what the software is made to do. If you are feeling
uncomfortable with Photoshop today, I hope to change that.
Here's to the learning curve: may it be steep enough to please,
but short enough enjoy. I guess I'm not a poet!
Anyway, to give you a little bit of info and
step off the soapbox now, I am going to teach you a little about
the pattern feature in Photoshop 6. Creating patterns is useful
for a number of things, from web page backgrounds to image
"noise" in a design. One of the new features in Photoshop 6 is
the option of saving patterns more easily and having them handy
for use anytime you want them in a handy drop-down box.
Photoshop 6 comes with a number of patterns for you to use
straight out of the box. You can see these by selecting the
paint bucket tool, now hidden behind the gradient tool. Set the
option to pattern in the option bar at the top of the screen It
will be in a drop down list, that is set to foreground as the
default. Once this is done, to the right of that drop down list
is a preview window. Inside this window is the currently
selected pattern. Use the arrow to the right of the this widow
to open up the options box. You can select any pattern you want.
To apply the pattern, simply click the paint
bucket tool on the canvas. It will cover the entire canvas by
tiling the pattern. You can of course apply the pattern to a
selection if you wish. Below are some examples of the stock
patterns and what they look like when applied to an entire
canvas. Not every one of these patterns is going to be useful to
you. And you are probably already thinking about some ways you
can use this... right?
Well fear not, because I am going to teach you
how do create your own patterns and rather than have them
disappear when you close the document, they will be saved in the
options box. Unfortunately, I have run out of time for this
week, so you will have to tune in next week.
Until then, you can gain a sneak preview of some more ways to
use patterns at
jlswebsource.com.
Below is a sample of a pattern I made in about
minutes. The smaller image is the pattern, and the larger is the
tiled pattern in on a canvas. Talk at you in 7 days.
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