Making your own seamless, tileable patterns in Photoshop is extremely useful for all sorts of design projects, and it adds a unique flavor to your work.
This tutorial will go through the basics of how to make tileable patterns in Photoshop, and then I’ll expand on this post by giving away some free funky, modern Photoshop patterns to make your designs stand out.
Modern Photoshop Patterns
Fabric patterns are great inspiration for making patterns in Photoshop. There are an incredible assortment of patterns available today, and many of them are modern, funky, or retro. These patterns are the same concept as a Photoshop pattern: a square canvas with a tileable image is defined and saved as a pattern, then used to create a variety of effects. Quilt patterns, wood slats, corrugated cardboard, brick walls, grass, and other images and textures can also be used for making patterns in Photoshop.
Photoshop Patterns Tutorial
First, we want to create the image. This can be as simple or complex as you want, and a lot of it will depend on how much control you want to have each time you use the pattern. For example, if you set a transparent background to the pattern, you will be able to manipulate the background color each time. You can also use the layer effects to give outlines, drop shadows, and more to the objects in the pattern. For the purposes of this tutorial, I’m going to create a simple Photoshop pattern. I’ll have some fun ones to give away really soon too!
You can set up your canvas in many different ways depending on how you want to use the pattern. For this pattern tutorial, I set up the canvas at 300 x 300 pixels. If your pattern is small, say with two different colored diagonal lines spanning the canvas, you can keep the size really small (20 x 20 pixels even). You can also scale the pattern size a bit when applying the pattern effect to a layer, but note that sizing is going to ruin the resolution at some point with a rasterized pattern. Importing vector patterns from Illustrator is the way to go if you want a scalable, lossless pattern. We’ll be covering Illustrator vector patterns in an upcoming post.
To start with, I used the pen and brush tools to create a simple dandelion image on a transparent background.
To test the pattern, I opened a larger document and lined up four copies of the image in a square using smart guides (View => Show => Smart Guides). I noticed there was a lot of empty space, so I added more copies of the dandelion. Keep in mind that the pattern must be tileable, so it’s important to test the pattern to make sure your objects are lined up once you tile the image. A grid system (View => Show => Grid) also helps keep everything in line. Notice on this pattern that the dandelion stem in the lower left corner continues in the upper left corner, and the little petal/seed in the upper right corner does the same in the lower right corner so that the pattern is seamless.
I tested the tileable pattern again in the large document and it looked like this:
Saving Patterns in Photoshop
Since we now know that the image will tile correctly, we can save the Photoshop pattern. Go to Edit => Preset Manager and select Patterns for the Preset Type. Then Select All (Ctrl + A) and select Delete. This will only delete the patterns from your loaded patterns so you have a clean working space. This way, you can create as many patterns as you want and save them as their own group, making it easier to locate them next time or share patterns with others if you want to distribute them as shareware.
There should be no patterns in your Preset Manager window now. Select Done. After this, go to Edit => Define Pattern and name the pattern. You can create other patterns to go with this pattern as a set, or simply save it individually. Whichever way, when you are ready to save the pattern(s), go to your paint bucket tool (Alt + click on the Gradient Tool), select Pattern instead of Foreground in the top menu, and hold down the arrow next to the pattern image. Click the arrow in the top right corner of the pop up box, and select Save Patterns.
Make sure to save it in the right spot in your Adobe Presets folder—if you are using Vista, you need to save it to another folder and then drag it into this folder.
Voila! You now know how to make patterns in Photoshop.
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Comments
10.16.09
… I also find myself torn between the coffee shop and my dual monitor setup
11.04.09
May I suggest ABR Viewer as an alternative to loading and trying each brush in Photoshop? It’s free, and I use it regularly. You may find this a great time-saving alternative!
http://abrviewer.sourceforge.net/
Hope it helps!
11.04.09
Thanks for the referral, Cyndi! I’ll have to spend some time tonight trying it out.
02.11.10
I love you to pieces man!!
10.14.10
I wished and wished for a Mac, then was given one at work.
So I moved all my files over.
I HATE it. I’m a designer. I have about 50 folders for 50 different projects. I name the banner psd “banner.psd” for all of them. Try and search for them all, yeah the Mac finds them but then you have to do “get info” for each one (or change some such setting and still click on each to see where the dang thing is located. On windows. I glanced at the path to the folder and voila. Yeah changing permissions on Vista is a headache but it’s far better than the constant problems I have on the Mac. Photoshop is twitchy at best, the thing crashes, although my Roku, PS3, Wii, personal laptop all do fine with my wirless, the mac drops it all the time. I use multiple monitors. Oh my god what idiot thought of leaving the application menu on one screen when the application is on another? You can only choose one little sprout because Steve Jobs knows better than you how you should work.
can’t wait to ditch it.
sorry tirade over.
ps tons of free windows applications out there.
11.26.10
Um… how about not naming all of your files the same name? Sounds more like an organizational issue than an operating system issue, either way.
I might recommend using an identifier and THEN _banner.psd? I assume it’d be difficult to find photos as well if every picture on a drive had its own folder and was named “photo.jpg”.
Examples:
Projectname_size_banner.psd
Clientname_size_banner.psd
etc…
04.17.11
Ok, so… I’m a total newbie to photoshop. I have CS5 and a brickton of brushes. I have tried renaming them, but they do NOT show up in the list like I want them to. I’ve played around with it for like a half hour. Can anyone please help?