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Lesson Info

Create Continuous Photoshop Patterns And Pattern Brushes

now some of these bricks, as I explained when we photographed them were in a position where the sun was shining through trees and so we wouldn't want to use this necessarily. Although you never know, it might work for something. So I'm gonna go ahead and pick this texture here which has no particular sunlight on it. It's still got all of the greens of the brick there. And we're going to turn this into a texture, first adding it to our library and then turning it into a repetitive pattern. So let's head over to Photoshop a few tips when you're editing your textures. One of the things I like to do is turn my textures into black and white. You can always add color later on using adjustments. But starting out with a black and white texture means that it's not going to cast a particular hue onto what you're placing it on. So we're going to do that and we're also going to make it 50% great approximately because then we can use all of the blending modes in that overlay section and drop out th...

e grays and be left with the textures. So let's go into camera raw. So in camera raw, let's just adjust this until it looks like it's about 50% gray. Now we can see this if you have a look at the instagram at the top there, we want to get that in the middle. So we move it around. All right. And if we set that right in the middle, that's at about the 50% gray mark. Now we also can adjust our highlights and shadows if we want a bit more detail we can adjust our whites and blacks. It's completely up to you how much of that texture you want to highlight. But then we can pull our saturation down so that this is completely black and white. There's no color tinge to it. So now that we've got the texture in Photoshop, we want to make it so that it's available in our library. Now that that's in there, I can go across to any of my images and I can drop that in. So let's drop it onto a homeless penguin just to give you an example of what will happen because it's a texture. We're not too worried if it goes out of proportion. So I'm going to hit shift and resize this. So it covers the whole canvas and I now can add a blending mode to this layer. This section here is not really what we'd use for this kind of texture. Darken takes away the light areas. So all of these particular blending modes take away the light areas. And this section here that we used when we did the steam and the atmospheric haze that takes away the dark areas the black. It is actually this third section that takes away the grays and gives you more flexibility with textures that have that balance of darks and lights and in betweens as with anything. It's a matter of playing with the different blending modes until you get something that you really, really like. And different images will suit different blending modes. One of the most common ones to use though is overlay and soft light. If we turn overlay on. The other thing that you would often do with a texture is just pull down the opacity, don't want it to be over the top. Now this texture would work quite well on something that has less detail. And I don't often put textures like this on my very, very detailed work because there's there's so much going on in this particular image. Now, one of the benefits of turning this particular texture into a pattern means that you can use it across anything no matter how big it is and it will be repetitive. So there's no edge or end to it. I'll show you how to achieve this. So at the moment, if we placed this into an image, it has an edge, an obvious edge. Now, if we want to make a pattern out of it, the first step is to do the offset filter which we did do earlier. So we're trying to find that crossover and put it somewhere in the middle. Now, you can see here that we've got the edges here and here. So what we're trying to do right now is to get rid of that so that it's just completely repetitive. So what you do need to do is do make sure that it is rest arised and we are doing destructive editing when we're doing this and this is not something that I normally do in a composite. Keep in mind we're working destructively just because we're creating a pattern. But if you're wanting to go backwards on something, this is not the ideal scenario because once we've done this it's locked in but it is the best way to create a repetitive pattern. So what I'm doing here is I've got the patch tool and I am just circling around the joints and using the patch tool. That one didn't work very well using the patch tool to try and hide those joints. So I just continue to work my way around the image until I don't really see any edges. Now you could sort of join up where those lines are falling. Um If you work carefully you can kind of really make this work now in doing this, you may need to lighten off areas. So everything is even you can see this middle area is quite dark compared to the rest. So one way you can do this is circle around the area that you want to make blend better and create a levels adjustment layer. Now it's only going to show up where we circled it and that's ok. What we're trying to do is match it and then we can mask and blend it off. So I'm adjusting this, looking at this section here and trying to match it. So that's a little bit closer and then we'll blend this. Now you could feather the edge or you could just use a brush and a low flow and just mask it until it looks even. I'd then advise probably flattening again again. This is very, very destructive and not a way I would normally work but in creating a pattern or a brush I would. Alright so now that we've got that to a point where it looks quite continuous, we go ahead and check again. So we're going to other offset, we move around our edge. Another time we might see some discrepancies when we do that. So I can already see one just there. So again I'm going to grab that patch tool and fix that section there. And are there any other spots looking pretty good? I'll offset it one more time to make sure now that we've made it continuous so that there's no edge. We're going to edit, define pattern and we're going to call this brick texture. I'm going to add a pattern adjustment layer, not the grass. That's another one I've created though. Alright, so there we've got it now we can actually resize this pattern. It's scaled at 100% at the moment. You can go bigger, you can go smaller so you can change the size which is really great to be able to create a flexible pattern and maybe you want finer details. Maybe you want larger details. So you can do that even once you've made the adjustment on the blending mode, you can adjust that as well. So we press Ok and have a look at the different adjustments so you can see it's a bit tighter of a pattern than when I placed it in and it's just repeating. So there's no edge to it. If I go back into it and I want to make it bigger, I can do that too and I can see the effects straight away. Now, what else can we do with the pattern? Well, maybe we just want to fill a section with the pattern. So we draw the area that we want to fill and then we create a pattern and then we choose that pattern. Alright. What if we want to use the pattern on a brush? So you can actually go to the pattern stamp tool? So have a look at this. There's the clone stamp tool and there's the pattern stamp tool. So the pattern stamp tool, you need to have a blank layer ready to go and you can choose a pattern that you've created. What happens if we want to actually use a different shaped brush? So not a regular shaped brush with our pattern. So this is the regular shaped brush, we can use that and paint with our pattern with that one. What happens if we want to use the brush that we created? Well, one thing that you need to keep in mind if I go into brush settings on this brush when you create the brush, make sure that this brush doesn't have include tool settings. If you include the tool settings when you create it, you will find that it's locked to the paint. It's not able to be used as a pattern brush. But if you don't include tool settings then you can use it as a pattern shaped brush. One of my favorite brushes that I've created in a set is a foliage brush. Now the foliage brush has the pattern of foliage that I photographed and I can actually use it because it also has the shape of foliage attached to it. I'll show you what I mean. So this is my magic brushes set and there's a few different ones in here. I'm going to use the light foliage and the brush was first created from foliage in terms of its shape. So you can see the shape that it gives when I tap with it. But if we then start drawing with it or painting with it, it's creating foliage with the shape, but also with the texture of foliage, complete foliage real, real pixels. And you can do so much with this. I'm going to show you a couple more techniques. One of them is to add cracks to a scene and the other is to create a tree brush. So let's go to the cracks. So I'm going to grab this shot of the cracks that I photographed and I'll open it in camera, which will then take me into Photoshop for this one. I want to really accentuate the cracks themselves. I don't want to see the texture of the ground. So for this one, I'm going to emphasize the blacks and pull out as much as I can of that mid tone. So there are still a few little divots and things in there. But this is just emphasizing the cracks themselves. You can increase the texture which might bring a bit more of that out and once that's ready I'm going to pull that saturation down so it's just black and white. The final thing that I'm going to do in camera. Raw is just to crop it so I've got the fine details in the image so I can create a pattern just out of the cracks, open object and then we go to filter and offset. Move it until we can see the two edges and already it's looking quite consistent. It is hard to see where the edges sit, there's edges there so I don't need to do much to it. So I press OK and I'm going to use the patch tool just to join some of these areas so they've got extra cracks. You better rest arrives at first and then I'm going to grab a little bit of a crack from here and pop it there. We don't want any blurry bits. So just watch out for that with this kind of texture. If you change the patch to content aware, it will not do that blur. So depending on what you're doing, you might want it on normal content where you may get a cleaner result, there's more cracks on this side than there is on this side. So what I could do is sell it an area there and grab a cracked area from there just to add to the texture of this section. Looking pretty good. One more offset. Alright, I'm happy with this as a pattern. So we go to edit defined pattern and we call this cracks and now we can apply that over an element. So I'll go to this this one here and show you how it looks on the train itself. So we can go pattern. She's the one that we just created which is the cracks and we can make them bigger, we can make them smaller. But remember, the blending mode that we need to use here is multiply or darken or color burn. Now all of those will drop out the white and leave the black. So if you're wanting to have cracks on a part of a train for example, you could use that. You can change the blending mode and opacity to suit and then you could mask in and out the area that you want. So I am going to mask back in this side of the train here with the cracks and of course we wouldn't want cracks on the pole. So control where the cracks are applied. If your composite is fully layered, you can clip these adjustments to the different areas of your composite at the moment. I'm just working on a flat version of it for demonstration purposes. The first thing we want to do here is again, we're looking for a very highly contrast E black and white. This is to create the shape. This is not to create the texture. So we're going to play with our exposure. Are blacks, are whites. Turn the saturation down. We want a really strong contrast between the branches and the sky. Now we can get rid of all of this in Photoshop pretty easily too. So once we've got it to the point that we think we can work, it will go into Photoshop. So now that we've done that we can create a brush now. Remember the brush needs to be black on white, not white on black. So we've got that correct. Now if we go to edit and we go to see what happened to find brush preset is grayed out. Do you remember what it was that we needed to do to make this a brush? It was to ensure that the images under 2000 pixels. Now first step might be to crop this in a little bit because there's areas that we don't really need right now that we've done that it's still going to be too big. So if we go to image image size, It's actually 6000 wide by 4,438. So let's make that longest side 2000 pixels and press. Ok, alright. Now we can go to edit, define brush preset and this is our tree. Now if you remember the steps that we made before we do need to now adjust our brush and create a variable brush that moves that changes and does what we wanted to in the brush presets. So let's go to window brush settings and you can see these are all really close together. If we go to brush tip shape, the first thing we're gonna do is spread that out so that if we're drawing with this for some reason it is spread out. Now we may want this brush to rotate but we may also want to control the rotation with our pen. So I'm gonna show you how to do it that way because this is gonna be a brush that we use to mask in with. So we actually want this to be highly controlled as to what direction it's facing. The first thing that I want to do is just have this upright to start with. So now our brush is upright. The next thing that we want to do is control our angle before we used angle geologist to randomize the angle but we can control it with a number of different things here and one of the ones that I use often is pen tilt. Now the pen tilt means that your pen, your wacom pen when you tilt it, it actually rotates your brush and that is what I want to be able to do. So if I'm tilting you can see the brush is tilting and I can have complete control about the angle and I can see it right now exactly where it's going to sit, angle pen tilt, you can try a few of those other settings if you want to control it in a different way, particularly if you're using a mouse, you might need to use something else to control the tilt. So we need to save this, this is our tree creative lives. So tree cl I'm not going to include tool settings in this because I might want to add a pattern to it later on. I'm not going to capture the brush size in the preset either because I may not want it to start at a particular size. So let's just save that. Now now we have our tree, we'll go down to our brushes and we'll drag this final one into my collection. Okay, so now you have read fog and tree and tree is able to be just a normal mask entry. So if we want to actually mask with this, if I go to the background layer and create a mask on it, it will mask. That's what I would primarily use that with. But you might also want to make this brush into a brush that has a pattern of a tree in it. Now, obviously the branches will still have that pattern in it, but they're so skinny, it might not be as noticeable. So let's do one final thing where we make this into also a tree with foliage in it.