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Lesson Info

Using Pattern Overlay and Pattern Fill in Photoshop

And we'll move into our other example. So I'm going to bop over to Bridge. Maybe, there we are. And the next one that we're going to work with is this one of this gentleman right here. So this one is a lot of fun. We're going to do some different things with this, playing around with textures. So for this piece, before we get started, we should duplicate the background. That's a nice habit to get into. So you can do that quickly by pressing control or command J, to jump a copy up in your layers panel. And like we did earlier with the glitter, we're going to desaturate this. So the keyboard shortcut for that is command or control shift U, for unsaturate I guess. Of course the long hand way, you can come up to image, adjustments, and choose desaturate. Okay. So we're going to be adding a lot of different texture and fun elements to this photo. For our first one, let's come down and add a new layer. We'll start by painting, similar to how we just did. And we're going to create a new blank...

layer. And we're going to add an effect to it just like we did with the glitter. This time we'll click effects, and we'll choose pattern overlay. So we should see our glitter here from last time. But this time we'll click the down arrow, and we're not going to use any of these pre-sets. People I think don't realize how much textures and cool things come with Photoshop, so I always like when I'm teaching, I like to highlight that stuff because you don't have to have fancy plug-ins and all this extra stuff. Like Photoshop has some pretty cool stuff that just come standard with it. So we're going to click this little gear icon here. And we're going to choose from this list of all these different collections of patterns, we're going to be choosing from the nature patterns. So we'll click that. And then it's going to ask if we want to replace or append. Append means that it's just going to add all these patterns to whatever is going on here, and this list gets really long and messy quickly. So I'm going to click okay, but that's why I already saved my preset, so we're not going to lose it. So we'll click okay. It's going to prompt us to save them, but we already did, so I'll say don't save. And now we see this collection of nature patterns. This one right here is, there we go, there's the pop up I was looking for earlier, grass. So I'm going to click to select grass. And we'll change the blend mode from luminosity back to normal. And I forget what the scale should be, so we'll just pick a number to start with, and we'll adjust that as we need to later. So I'm going to go ahead and click okay. So for painting this, we're going to use a default brush that just comes standard with Photoshop. So it doesn't really matter what color we have here because unlike the glitter that we used that special blend mode, luminosity, to blend the glitter with the paint. In this case we're not blending. The pattern is going to be applied just normally. It's just going to cover whatever's there. So it doesn't matter what color we have. We're going to come up to our brushes. And I'm going to open the defaults, and if you scroll through your default brushes far enough you should eventually find something called grass. So we're going to double click to select that. And I'll zoom in here. I'm pressing command or control plus to just scooch in so I can see a little bit better what I'm doing. I'm going to use the left bracket key to adjust the size of this brush. And I'm just going to, let me make sure everything's set up right. We've got the brush, normal blend mode. We don't care about our paint in this case. We have a blank layer with a pattern overlay applied to it. And now I'm just going to paint. And if we, I think we'll have to adjust our pattern so we can see it. Let's go, double click our pattern overlay, and adjust our scale to find a good value for that. I think right about at 100% is what we want that scale to be. So you drag that around to close to 100% or you can just type it right here, and then click okay. So now this is where the fun part comes in, we are painting a grass beard for him. And we didn't have to make any selections. I'm just like painting, and it's creating this texture. And if we zoom in, we can see that it's, I mean it has so much texture. So it really looks like he has a grassy beard. So I'm just going to drag this around. I'm just working my way around the image to fill in this beard. You could also have made a selection of his beard, and then done this. Just filled it with a pattern like we're going to do for some other areas of this image. But what I like about doing it this way is painting it with this brush. You get this really textured edge, and if you just made a selection and filled it, it wouldn't work out the same way. So we'll go up and give him some side burns. With grass. And then, I think we've got most of that, of course we cannot send him out into the world without grassy eyebrows. I just, I don't know why I love this like so much. They're very bushy eyebrows. Okay, cool. I love that. I think we could just call it good right there. But let's take care of the rest of the image. So for the rest of this image we're going to do some different techniques. Rather than just painting and having a pattern effect applied to that layer, we are going to make a selection and then use an adjustment layer to fill the selection with a pattern. So just to help you understand the difference in what's happening here, let's say that I want to hide this effects from the layer two. So let's click this little eyeball here to hide the effects. And then let's look at this. So basically, this makes it easier to see any spots that I've missed, what I've done is I've used that brush, that grass brush, and I've just like painted him a beard. And his beard is a mix of purple and white because this brush by default, it uses a mix between your current foreground and your current background color. So just automatically it jitters back and forth between foreground and background colors. So if you had like red and yellow here, his beard would be red and yellow and orange and. So if you care about the colors, you know that's your choice. But in this case because we're applying the pattern on top of it and we're using normal blend mode, this color just goes away. So we can create that in whatever color we want. So when we turn the effect back on, that pattern gets applied on top of the paint that we've laid down. So what we're going to do next is different though. So I'm going to target the layer one, that's the black and white copy of the background, and I'm going to grab the quick selection tool here. So the keyboard shortcut for this tool family is W. But just make sure the W family has two members, the magical one tool and the quick selection tool. So for this we're going to use the quick selection tool. And it's a magical brush really that lets you select different parts of an image. So for example if I want to select his suit jacket here, I'm just going to click and drag and I'll hold down shift to add to that. And click and drag again, and it just makes a pretty decent selection. It missed this spot up in the corner of his jacket, so I'm going to press the left bracket key to make my brush a little smaller, and then I can just click up in here and kind of paint that. And it will incorporate it. So we made just a quick selection of his jacket. I think I saved this too in the file for you, if you go to select and choose load selection. I did create all of these selections ahead of time for his suit and his hair and his beard and the background. So if you have trouble for one reason or another, you can load the selection that I already made. So you would just choose, let me do that again. You would just choose select, load selection, and then from here where it says channel, select in this case like suit for example, and then you click okay. And then it will give you the suit. But it's pretty easy to do with the quick selection brush. So we've got a selection. This time instead of just painting, we're going to take our active selection, and then we'll come down to the bottom of the layer's panel again, and this time we're going to create an adjustment layer. And an adjustment layer is this little icon here that looks like a half circle. And if you click on it, there's all different types of adjustment layers that you can create. And in this case we want to make a pattern adjustment layer. So we'll select pattern. And now we can give him a fun pattern in his suit. So we'll stick to our current nature collection here. So again I just click this little down arrow. And we should still see our nature pattern. And I loved this one for whatever reason, these flowers. It goes so nicely with the green, then the purple. So I'm going to click to select that. And just like before, we can scale it by adjusting the slider. I'm going to stick to 100% for that for right now. And we'll go ahead and click okay. So let's talk about what is happening. We selected his suit jacket. And with that selection active, we added this adjustment layer that contains a pattern fill. And because we had a selection active when we did that, it created a matching layer mask so that this pattern, instead of filling our whole document and the whole layer, instead it only shows up where we have the selection. So we're getting to work a little bit with layer masks as well. Okay, let's keep going, and let's do his hair. So we'll go back to layer one. We need to target layer one one more time. And with that quick selection brush we'll just drag it around in his hair. And again, if you have any trouble making these selections, you can just go to select, load selection. From this channel, drop down, choose the appropriate one, and then click okay. Alright, so now we have his hair. And we're going to fill that with another pattern using an adjustment layer. So again from the bottom of the layer's panel, we'll click this little adjustment layer icon, choose pattern. And this time we'll change to a different collection of patterns, so again, click the little gear icon right here. And this time we want, I think it's just called patterns two. And again it's going to ask do we want to append this or just replace it. And like I said before, it gets messy quickly if you don't just replace it, so I'm going to click okay to replace it. And I want to use this blue wave pattern. And maybe I boost the scale here a little bit. Normally you wouldn't want to increase the scale really too much beyond 100% because it can tend to get garble-y looking, but some of them will hold up. So I really like the look of this, like he's got blue gel in his hair, blue waves. So we'll go ahead and click okay. Now if we don't like the way it's interacting with the beard over here, we could drag the beard layer below to change that if we want to. But I think I'm going to leave it on top like that. Maybe I want to go back to my beard layer and fill it in. So maybe I want to go, press B, to get my brush tool, and make sure I have this grass still. And I can just paint some more on top of this layer if I feel like I missed a spot. Like this area could be a bit denser, so I'll just paint over it. You know it's always important when you're working in this stuff to remember that you have to be flexible and you know every time I create a project, it always looks a little bit different. So that's why it's art. Okay, and finally let's select the background, and then we'll fill that in with another pattern as well. So I'll click again layer one because this is the layer that contains the background information. I can't make a selection of the background if I'm on layer two, which is the grass. Let me rename that, double click to rename it. Or not the grass, it's his beard made of grass. I can't select the background if I'm on the beard layer, so I want to select the appropriate layer. And then I'll grab my quick selection brush. And click to select the background and click over here to get both sides of that. And then another adjustment layer. So from the bottom of the layers panel, click to select that adjustment layer icon. And again pattern. And this time we're going to choose pattern two, I believe. So from this little carrot, click the down arrow. And then we're going to switch back to a different category of patterns. So click the gear. And I think this is patterns two. Click okay again. Oh maybe, sorry, it is in this, we are in pattern two. Alright, so we already have it here, perfect. So from this drop down, you don't even have to go get another pattern, it's right here. It's this one, I think it's called carpet. But it's this top left blue one. And I'll leave the scale set to 100%. This one does get a little garble-y if you enlarge it, but maybe this is a look that you like. You know it's up to you. But I'm going to keep that at 100%. And click okay. So this is looking pretty awesome I'd say, that's ready for it's magazine spread, but let's add just to sort of recapture some of the dramatic lighting. If I option click on this layer one layer, I love this image, like it's so dramatic, and he's so like George Clooney-esque. And I just love it. And I like this vignette that it has happening around it, so I want to recreate that in our piece here a little bit. So I'm going to target the top most layer in our layers panel. And then we'll add one more adjustment layer. So I'm going to click down here, and we're going to choose gradient. And actually, to make it easier, let's cancel. Before we choose that gradient, let's reset our default colors. So I'm going to press D on my keyboard for default. The reason is that gives me black and white. So what I want for this vignette, and there's a lot of other ways to make vignettes too, but we're working with adjustment layers and they're just so much more flexible. So we're going to create a vignette, not with a filter or anything like that, but with an adjustment layer. What makes the vignette effect is a gradient that goes from black to transparent. So it's easier rather than having to edit the gradient, it's just easiest of you set your default colors first, and then we come over here and add that adjustment layer with a gradient, not gradient map, they're two different things believe it or not. But just a straight up gradient. And here we want to choose, instead of linear, we want to choose radial. And up here from this drop down, we want, it might be there by default, but you probably if you've never messed with this before, you probably have this happening. So what we want is the second gradient. So you want to click this little down arrow and select the second gradient. This one goes from whatever color you have here, this is why we reset it to black. It goes from black to transparency. So that's what we want. And we want the style to be radial so that it's not linear like this. We want it to be radial. But we want it to be clear in the middle and black on the edges. So we'll come down here and click reverse. And then what we can do is adjust the scale right here to sort of determine like how big or not our gradient is. So this is just personal taste. I don't know, maybe we'll do something like that. And click okay. And we can play with this. We can change the blend mode to multiply or overlay changes it. It has a bit of a different effect. I kind of like them both, so personally I was really torn between overlay and just multiply, which would kind of be a standard vignette kind of thing. But, so, take your pick, but that would add a nice little vignette to this. And I think it just finishes the piece off. So it sort of recreates the lighting that we lost because we filled everything in with patterns.