From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Creating and applying custom pattern fill layers - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Creating and applying custom pattern fill layers

“

- [Instructor] Pattern fill layers are an excellent way to fill areas with seamless tiled patterns. In this example, we're going to create our pattern from a photo of some peppers. Save it as a custom pattern and then fill the inside of this box cover with that pattern. Starting with the red peppers, you'll notice that in the layers panel, all of the layers have been converted to smart objects, and that's just because when we create our pattern fill, it's going to want to work with smart objects. I'll choose the view menu and then select pattern preview. We can see that it's telling us that it wants to work with smart objects. And then I'm going to use the command minus key to zoom out. So the square in the center, this blue square, is going to define the pattern, but we can select any of the different layers in order to reposition them. So with the move tool selected, all enable auto select, and then we can start repositioning all of our different objects. So I'll bring that down a bit and maybe this one as well. Let's bring this one over to the right. Now I'm just going to zoom out to see if this looks even and if it doesn't, we can just select the different layers and I'm just using the arrow keys to nudge them. I think this one is a little too close as well. So let's bring that up and then we might need to bring this one over as well. All right, when we are finished, we can use the edit menu and then choose to define our pattern. We'll call it Red Pepper and we can see it appear in the patterns panel. Now let's move to the box.jpeg. I'm going to want to position this pattern on top of the box and clip it to the box. I'll use the select menu and choose subject. Photoshop will automatically select the subject for me, and we can use layer new and then layer via copy or command J on Mac, CTRL J on Windows to copy the box to its own layer. Now, in order to add a pattern fill layer, I can simply click on the pattern. We can see it in the layers panel, and it automatically created a clipping mask with layer one. If we want to change the scale or the angle of the pattern, we can double click on the icon for the pattern and then change the scale or the angle and then commit to that change. Now, in order to use the perspective warp option, I'm going to need to convert the pattern fill layer into a smart object. So I'll right click and choose convert to smart object. Then I'll choose the edit menu and prospective warp. Now there's a layout and a warp mode, and I want to create the layout first. So I'm going to drag out three different planes. I'll drag out the first one, and then I'll position my cursor close to this upper right corner, and then I'll drag out a second plane. And Photoshop will automatically snap those two planes together. We can also drag from the other side if we think that's going to be easier and it will snap those planes. All right, I just want this one to be level, so they're all the same. Now I don't want to start warping the planes until I go into warp mode. Now as I start repositioning the planes, you can see that I'm changing the perspective of the image. So let's go ahead and line these up and these at the bottom. And now it's starting to look better, right? Because this pattern of this pepper right here, for example, should be much lower. It should be at the same height as the other peppers in the pattern. So sure enough, we can bring this down and then let's lift this up and adjust these additional edges. Bring that down, and that is looking good. All right, I'll bring that down a little further. Excellent. I will apply that and I can make this look a little bit more realistic by changing the blend mode from normal to multiply. And if I wanted to make any changes to the pattern, I can double click on the pattern fill that will bring up the contents of the smart object in its own window. Then I would double click on the pattern. And let's say I wanted to take this down to 30%. I'll apply that. Then choose file and save to save the changes. And when we close this, we can see that it's been updated in the box. I don't really like the spacing right now. So I've got the move tool selected, and we can use our arrow keys just to nudge the pattern. Now in this example, we used an image to create a pattern, but you can use any type of layer, including shapes or text as the basis for the patterns. With the help of pattern preview, it's easy to arrange them to create scalable, rotatable patterns to apply to our images.

Contents