Sometimes I get so wrapped up in complex design solutions I forget the simple things. Like making patterns! So here is a quick and easy solution to turning any jpeg image (or indeed any image you can open in Photoshop) into a repeating pattern. These aren’t seamless repeats – but not everyone wants them to be seamless – sometimes all you need is to make a repeating pattern from something! So here’s how to do it – just make your selection – save it as a pattern and fill a new document with it – it is quick and easy.
I’ll show you how to do this with text and with a photo, they both work exactly the same.
See how to turn simple shapes in Photoshop into ornate circles. The process is simple and you can source the elements to use from the web as free shapes – I tell you where to get them from.
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley.
Welcome to this video tutorial.
In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can make circular ornaments in Photoshop.
Before we get started with this tutorial let’s have a look and see what we’re aiming for.
This is one of the floral ornament shapes that I’ve created and I’m going to show you how you can create this quickly and easily in Photoshop.
And I’m using Photoshop CS6 for this technique.
If you’re using an earlier version you may need to adapt parts of the tutorial but you can still do it.
So let’s just close this down and let’s create a new document, File, New.
And it doesn’t really matter too much.
I’ve just got a 600 x 600 RGB document with a white background.
You can create pretty much anything.
Now before we actually start making our shapes we’re going to need to find some things to make them with and what I’ve done is I’ve located some places on the web that you can get these from.
So I’m going to this particular site here which is all-free-download.com.
It’s all-free-download.com.
And if you go searching for vector floral clipart you’ll be able to find this file here.
And this is the one that I’ve used so you just click it and then go ahead and download it.
And once you’ve downloaded it you can open it.
And I’ve got it open here now in Windows Explorer and I’ve actually gone ahead and extracted all the files.
And in this particular file there’s a floral clipart AI which is an Illustrator file and there’s also a CSH file.
And the CSH file is a Photoshop one so you can use that.
And what I did was I put the shapes in Photoshop’s shapes collection.
So I’m going to show you how you can do that now.
I’m just going to size the Photoshop screen down so that I can see the Photoshop screen as well as my Windows Explorer screen here.
And I’m going to grab the tools and I want the Shapes tool because I want the Shapes panel here.
So I’m going to open this up here and click this icon here which opens up the Shapes fly out menu.
And I’m going to choose Load Shapes because when I do that Photoshop takes me to the custom shapes location.
So this is where it expects the custom shapes to be.
So what I’m going to do is show here my Windows Explorer folder and I’m just going to drag and drop floral clipart into here.
In fact I’ve already done it.
You can see it’s here so I’m not going to drag it in a second time.
But you would drag the floral clipart CSH or the shapes file which is a Photoshop file into this custom shapes folder.
And when you do the custom shapes are now available inside Photoshop.
So you can close everything down.
I’ll just close this for now.
Okay, let’s go back to our document untitled2.
I’m going to make this screen, Photoshop screen, the full screen size.
So now we’re ready to go to our shapes.
I’m going to click here.
This is the Shapes collection.
Usually you’ll see the Rectangle tool but we’re actually going for the Custom Shape tool.
And because my image is 600 x 600 in size I’m going to put a couple of guides in here.
So I’m going to choose View, New Guide and I’m going to put a vertical one at 300 pixels, that’s 300 px, and click Ok.
And I’m going to go ahead and put a horizontal one in, click Horizontal, type 300 px and click Ok.
So now I have my center point marked and that’s just going to make things a whole lot easier in a minute.
So I’m going to create a new layer by just clicking the Create New layer icon here at the foot of the Layers palette because I want to work on an empty layer.
Now I used Kuler a little bit earlier to get my color scheme and I have a video on using Kuler in Photoshop that you may want to look at on this YouTube channel.
But basically what I did was I went to Window Extensions, Kuler and I launched Kuler.
Well, that’s just hidden it, hasn’t it.
So here’s Kuler and I went looking for flowers and I searched for flowers and I located a flower color scheme that I really like.
So I just clicked here and choose Add to Swatches Panel.
And here are the flower colors added to my Swatches panel so I thought we’d choose a different color flower this time.
So I can just tuck Kuler away because I don’t need it anymore.
I do need my Layers panel.
I do need my tools and I will like my swatches to be open.
So with the custom shape selected I’m going to go and first show you how you would add these shapes in because I’ve already done that.
But you’ll click the fly out menu and you should see your shapes in here.
They should be listed.
If they’re not then you can click Load Shapes and go and load the floral clipart shapes and click Load and then they’ll be loaded into your panel.
So they’ll be here.
Now I’ve got two sets of them but that doesn’t matter too much.
Now the first thing I’m going to do is choose one of these shapes to work with and the ones that I worked with were the fairly small ones, things like this or this that had sort of nice floral elements.
But they were fairly simple.
So I think we’re going to start with something a little bit more complex this time.
So let’s select this one.
I’m just going to click it.
And on the toolbar here I want to be working in shapes so I want this to be shape not path or pixels.
In earlier versions of Photoshop you will need to select an icon here.
It won’t be on a dropdown menu and you won’t have these features here for fill and stroke.
But you’ll be able to select the fill color and I don’t want a stroke on this at all.
But I do want a fill color and I’m going to select one of my floral colors that I used or grabbed from Kuler.
So now I’m going to make a blue shape with no stroke and I’m just going to draw it out here.
And I’m going to hold the Shift key so it’s constrained to its original proportions.
I’m just going to let go.
So you can see now I have this shape on a new layer and it’s just a blue shape.
I’m going to drag it into position.
Now I think in actual fact that I would like the bigger end on the outside so I’m going to drop it down here because that means that this bigger end is going to be on the outside of the circle as I work.
And now I’m going to press Ctrl or Command T because this gives me my Transform tools.
And what I want to do first of all is find this little marker that’s in the very, very center of the image.
And I’m going to drag it around and I’m going to pop it just right over the middle the image.
And then I’m going to set this option here this angle option to how many degrees I want to transform this image in.
And there is 360 degrees in a circle so we need something that will divide into 360 equally.
So for example if we want 10 shapes around it we could do 36 degrees.
Numbers like 30, 60, 45, 10 are good values.
I’m going to choose 30.
So I’m going to type in 30 here and you can see that the shape has started to rotate.
And I’m going to click the checkbox.
So it’s started its rotation and to complete the rotation all the way around the circle I’m going to hold Ctrl and Shift and Alt all at the same time.
So I’m going to press Ctrl, Shift, Alt on the Mac, that would be Command, Shift, Option and then the letter T for Transform.
And every time I press the letter T because I have Ctrl, Shift and Alt held down you can see that it’s adding another shape.
So all I have to do is to press the letter T enough times that my shapes creates an entire circle.
And here is my shape here.
Now you can leave it as a shape layer if you want to.
You can resize it if you want to by holding Shift and Alt as you drag in or out on the handles.
I’m going to drag mine out a little bit.
I think this is going to be the larger of the shapes and I’m going to click the checkmark to confirm it.
Now so that my computer doesn’t get stressed out with having such a large shape I’m going to rasterize this.
So I’m going to right click and just rasterize the layer.
But you could leave yours as shapes if you wanted to.
Now I’m just going to click Create a New Layer.
And we’re just going to repeat this over and over again.
So I’m going to choose my Shape tool, my Custom Shape tool.
I’m going to choose a different shape this time.
So I’m looking for something interesting that will complement the shape that I have here.
And last time I used this shape as my final shape so I think I’m going to do that again.
So we’ll wait for a minute before we use that.
But let’s go and get this one that’s sort of like a leaf shape.
I’ll click on it.
And now on a new layer I’m going to turn this layer off for a minute so that I can see what I’m doing here.
I’ve got no stroke.
I’m going to change my fill this time to a green color and I’m going to just drag out my leaf shape.
I’m going to hold the Shift key so it’s constrained to its original size and dimensions and I’m going to position it pretty much over the center of the image.
And I’m doing that by holding the Spacebar down as I drag it into position.
And now I’ve got my green shape.
I’m going to select the Move tool so I can now rotate it and press Ctrl or Command T.
I’m going to drag this little indicator into the very middle of the intersection where those two gridlines are.
So I’m going to rotate around that location and I’m going to select the amount of rotation.
And I’m going to use 30 degrees again so I’ll type 30 and then I’m going to press the checkmark here to accept that transformation.
Now I’ll press Ctrl, Alt, Shift T to repeat that transformation and copy that shape.
And I’m going to do that until I get all the way around the circle.
So this is my second shape and if I click to show my first shape I can see the two shapes as they’re interacting.
I think I want to change the size of my top shape so I’m going to select that layer and with Shift and Alt held down I’m going to size it so that it appears as a much smaller shape here.
And I many also want to rotate it for example because I initially set 30 degrees as my rotation.
If I rotate this through 15 degrees it’s going to be slightly offset.
And I think that will be a good choice here.
So now let’s go ahead and make a third shape, again creating a brand new layer, selecting the Custom Shape tool and this time I’m going to go for this sort of filler shape.
I think this one here is going to be a good choice although this leaf could be used as well.
I’m going to select it and select a different color to use.
This time I think I’m going to choose this very light green color.
I’m on a new layer.
I’m going to drag out my shape.
I’m going to hold the Spacebar to move it into position and perhaps even hold the Shift key so that it’s constrained to its original proportions the way it was drawn originally.
And then I’m going to let go the Mouse button and then let go the Shift key so that it is now drawn on this new layer.
Now this is really quite a big element so I’m not going to need to have too many of them.
I’m just going to use the Move tool to line it up very neatly here.
I’m going to press Ctrl or Command T to get into free transform mode.
I’m going to move its little indicator all the way down to the middle here so that it is going to rotate around the circle and this time I only want a small number.
So if I rotate it through 90 degrees I’m going to get four of these shapes on the screen.
And that will be plenty.
I’m going to press the checkmark here to confirm this transformation and then let’s go back and press Ctrl, Alt, Shift T to make the additional shapes.
I’m going to press that three times so that we get this finished shape.
Now I’m thinking this particular shape might look better with a border on it so I’m going back to the Shape tools and this time I’m going to select a stroke.
And I’m going to add a lighter green stroke around it.
I’m going to make it a single line stroke and I’m just going to make sure that the size of the stroke is correct or sufficient for my needs.
I’m thinking probably about a 2 point stroke will be nice.
And I’m going to again make this into a rasterized layer by right clicking and choose Rasterize Layer.
And so there’s my additional shape.
I’m now going to drag on my greenery layer and move it on top of the original layer and I can also resize this layer if I want to make it smaller or larger or even moving it behind everything else.
Now one of the things that you can do then is to make the background layer a different color such as black.
I’ve selected the background layer and I’m pressing Alt Backspace to fill it with black.
I can also add effects to these layers.
Let’s go to this greenery layer and let’s add an outer glow.
So I’m choosing the Add Layer Style icon here and I’m going to add an outer glow.
At the moment it’s a white glow.
So I’m just going to increase its spread a little bit.
You can see it’s some dimension and a little bit of a glowing effect here.
And then let’s go and get a green color from the underlying image and use that as our glow.
Now we may not want it to be quite as feathered and we may just want it to a more harsh sort of glow which is quite possible and just click Ok.
And then we can do the same for this shape here and we could add a glow to it, again, Outer Glow.
Again, I’m going to sample a color.
I’m actually going to sample this blue color and then use something in that sort of same color range perhaps a bluey green for my outer glow.
I’m going to increase the spread and also soften it up a little bit so it really looks like a glow.
Perhaps we could use a different blend mode such as lighten or we could play with overlay or color dodge.
Some of these will work and some of them may not.
But you can certainly experiment with how these interact with not only the black layer but also the green sort of colored layer below.
And I’ll click Ok and then I’m going to press Ctrl and the semicolon to turn off the gridlines.
Now this shape is very different from the shape we saw earlier.
It’s created in exactly the same way but you can see the color scheme and the actual elements that I used to create these shapes are quite different.
But I’ve got two very interesting shapes that I could now use as backgrounds or elements in a collage or for some other purpose.
It’s very easy to create these rotated shapes and lots of fun.
I’m Helen Bradley.
Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial.
Look out for more tutorials on this YouTube channel and follow me at projectwoman.com where my blogs include tips and tricks on Lightroom, Photoshop, Illustrator, Photoshop Elements and a whole lot more.
Learn to add a texture to an image in Illustrator using an Opacity mask – also often called a Transparency mask.
This method is fool proof and it works – it’s also pretty simple… which is good!
Transcript:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I show you how to add a bitmap texture overlay over an image in Illustrator CS6. To see how we can use a transparency mask on an image to give it a sort of grunge or a slightly distressed look.
Let’s start off with a rectangle. So I’m going to create a rectangle the shape and size of my art board. And I already have it filled with a pattern here. This is the pattern that I’m using. It’s a pattern that we created earlier in another video. I’m going to choose Object and then Transform and then Scale because I want to scale the pattern down to around 75 percent of its original size. So I’ll just type 75 percent and in this case I’m transforming the patterns only. Actually that’s still a bit on the big side so let’s go back and scale this down to say 50 percent, again, just the pattern and click Ok.
So here is my pattern and I want to add a sort of grunge overlay effect to it so I’m going to choose Window and then Transparency because this is going to give me my transparency mask. And I’m going to double click here to create and edit my mask. So I have the mask selected here. This is my image selected. This is my mask selected and I’m going to add a file to it by choosing File Place and we’re going to select the sample that we created earlier and click Place. And here it is over the image. Now right now it’s fairly intense but I can invert it to reverse the colors from black and white to white and black so I get a different effect.
Now this particular mask is really quite a bit larger than the image so I’m thinking that if I scale it down to probably around 30 percent and fix the proportions of this it gets pretty near right here. So I’m just going to scale the original image to the size. Well maybe just a little bit smaller so that we can see that we’ve actually got this transparency mask effect on our image. This is the original look of our image and this is the mask version. Now again we can click Invert if we want to use the white areas of the image or here to use the black areas of the image as our mask. When I’m done with that I can just click back on my image to continue to work with it.
So here is my image or the original filled rectangle. As you can see the mask is applied to that filled rectangle and it’s going with it wherever it happens to go. So wherever I move my rectangle to three quarters or most of it is covered with this transparency mask. Just this bit is not covered. I wanted to show you that the transparency mask is only going to work on the areas of the image that we actually selected for it to work on. And it’s actually attached to this shape so it will travel with it.
So anytime you need to give an image a grunge or a distressed sort of look, head to Photoshop, grab a nice texture, turn it into as close to a black and white of an image as you can or even convert it to black and white. That’s fine too and then just bring it in onto a transparency layer as a transparency mask to give your underlying shape a more grunge look.
I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more tutorials on my YouTube channel and visit projectwomam.com for more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom and Illustrator.
Learn to use the new Pattern Maker in Illustrator CS6 to make repeating patterns.
This video covers the tools in the dialog and how to save the pattern. Make half drop repeats, brick and hexagonal patterns in a few seconds.
Transcript
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to make a repeating pattern in Illustrator CS6.
To make a repeating pattern in Illustrator we’re first going to need a shape to work with. So, I’m going to create just a little square shape to use, and I’m going to add a fill color to it. I’ll select a pink fill and then a blue border so we can see what we’re working with. And I’ll make it about a 5 point border. So that’s my shape that I’m going to work with. And I want it to be sort of like a flower shape so I’ll choose Effect, Distort and Transform, Pucker and Bloat. And I’m going to Bloat it to 200 percent and just click Ok. So, this is my shape that I’m going to be working with.
To make a repeating pattern all you need to do is choose Object and then Pattern and then Make. And we now have a pattern piece added to the Swatches panel so I’ll just click Ok. And that is as easy as it is to create a pattern in Illustrator. But of course now that we can see our pattern we may want to make some changes to it.
So firstly we can change the number of copies to say 3 by 3 but I have a 5 by 5 grid in place so I can see things clearly. Dim Copies allows you to dim the duplicate or the repeating pattern so that you can see which is your original piece and which is the repeating pattern I have that now set at 100 percent so the copies are not dimmed. Let’s go back to dimming them.
Now these settings here can be a little bit confusing when you first encounter them. What these Width and Height are is this blue box so that’s the box in which my pattern is created. So if I lock these together and if then I decrease them say to 150 these are going to be scaled proportionately because I have it locked. So I’m just going to press Tab. Now the box is squeezed up and you can see that my pattern is now going to overlap. And I can control how it overlaps by using these icons here. So I can show various pieces of my pattern. If I want it to be on top over here and underneath here for example I can adjust that. But if I take this up to larger than my pattern piece, and I know that this is going to be larger than my pattern piece, I’ve typed in 250 and pressed Tab.
Now you can see that we’ve built in extra space around our pattern piece so there is more room here for perhaps adding other elements. Here is the type of pattern. At the moment we have grid but we could do Brick By Row and then we can offset the brick by a certain amount, one third, three quarters and so on. There’s Brick By Column and the offset is in a different direction. There’s also Hex By Column and Hex By Row. And for this pattern piece I think Hex By Column looks pretty good so I’m going to settle on that. Now if I wanted to add a bit of extra horizontal spacing I could do so but I’ll need to size my tile to the art and then add it in because you can see that right now these are grayed out. But if I size the tile to the size of my art I can then add some extra spacing. At the moment this is unlocked so that’s 10 points of horizontal spacing and now 20 points of vertical spacing. But I prefer not to size my tile to the art so I’m just going to leave that as it is.
Now one of the other things that we can do in this pattern area is we can add extra bits to it. So this is actually looking a little bit small for me so let’s just take it up a little bit larger so I’ve got some extra room in here. And I’m going to select the Ellipse Tool and I’m just going to hold the Shift key as I draw in here a circle. And you can see that the circle has now become part of the pattern. So if I select on the circle here, hold the Alt key as I drag a duplicate away, I now have two circles. And they’re part of the repeating pattern. I’m going to hold my Shift key as I select over both, now hold Alt as I drag a duplicate away and here we have a total repeating pattern. But we’ve been able to add pieces to it because we were actually working in this Pattern Make feature in Illustrator when we did it. Now these can also be adjusted so we’ll see that in a minute. But for now let’s just click Done. And that has saved our pattern to the pattern Swatches in Illustrator.
So let’s just go and get our pattern piece and we’ll tuck it away here off the art board for a minute. I’m going to select a rectangle and draw a rectangle here and let’s turn off the Stroke and let’s fill it with our new pattern. And there it is. Now you might see a missing pixel through your pattern. Don’t worry. That won’t be there when you actually come to print it. It’s just a resolution issue. Now I have this shape here and I might say well that pattern is fine but it looks a bit big for the shape. So I’m going to choose Object, Transform and then Scale and I’m going to disable Transform Object so that will then scale the pattern down to 25 percent of its original size but not the object and then just click Ok. So there is my pattern filled shape.
Now this shape is, this pattern is in the Illustrator swatches. It is only going to exist for this document. So if you want to keep it go up here, select the dropdown list here and click Save Swatch Library as AI. So this means that you can get it back later on. I’m just going to call this flower55 and click Save. And so now that swatch will be available later on that I can come and get it if I want to reuse the swatch in another Illustrator document.
Now we’ve already seen how we can add shapes to our pattern. But what happens if we look at this and decide that the shapes are ok but the color is not? So what I’m going to do here is go to the Layers panel here and go and locate the actual pieces that are part of this pattern. So I’m going to select this piece here and with this piece selected I can now go and make changes to it. So I’m going to give it a green fill color and then I’ll go here and select the next piece. And this is now targeted and I’ll go and grab a different fill color for it. And let’s go and select this one. We’ll give it the same green fill color as we used previously. And then let’s target this one here and we’ll give it a yellow fill color.
So if you come back and look at your shape and say well yes the pattern looks really good but the colors are not right it’s very easy to open up the layers panel here and to make adjustments to it. So for example if we didn’t like the pink here I can grab the pink path here and you can see that the pink path here for the inside shape has been separated from the path that is the stroke. And then I can just select to apply a different fill color to this particular piece here. And it hasn’t adjusted the stroke. The stroke needs to be separately selected. Here is the blue stroke color here and we could perhaps make it a darker blue. So once I’ve got that looking the way I want it to I can just double check by filling it back in.
And if I say yes that’s fine, that’s exactly what I want, and now this has been created as a new pattern. But if it wasn’t, if I’d already created this as a pattern in the pink color and I wanted to also save a green version what I can do is click Save a Copy and I’m going to call this flower 45 and it will then be saved as a different pattern swatch so it won’t be created over the top of the original. And when I’m done I’ll just click Done.
So now I have two pattern swatches so I’m just going to click the shape here. You can see here now that we could fill it with this green pattern swatch or we can go back to the original pink one. If we go to green again we would probably want to scale this down. So we’ll go to Object, Transform, Scale, again transforming only the pattern, not the object itself. So there you have the ability to create repeating patterns very, very easily in Illustrator CS6.
Learn how to create a half drop repeating pattern in Photoshop. Also see how to fill a layer with a pattern and how to scale a pattern in Photoshop.
Check out all our video tutorials on our YouTube channel and subscribe to receive all of our videos as soon as they come out.
Complete transcript from video:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. Today I’m going to show you how to create half-drop repeating patterns in Photoshop. To create a repeating pattern I’m just going to create a new document of a fixed size. So I’m going to make mine 100 x 100 pixels in size, RGB color with a transparent background and I’ll click Ok. I’m going to zoom in here so we can see it a little more clearly on the screen. And I’m going to use a path for mine but you could start with anything you like at all. And I’m just going to click and drag and then click and drag in this direction because I want to make a sort of boomerang shape and click back over the starting point. Now I’m going to select my Direct Selection Tool, click on this point because I want to adjust it and Alt drag to split these two handles from each other, Alt drag again so that I can create this sort of boomerang shape. And I’m thinking that that looks pretty good. So now I’m going to turn this path into a selection by clicking here on the Load Path as Selection. I’m going to display my Layers palette so we can see what’s going on here. I have a color already selected so I’m just going to Alt Backspace Option Delete on the Mac to fill this shape with my color. Now I’m thinking I would like a stroke around this as well so I’m just going to stroke it. I could stroke it from the work path but it’s easier just to stroke this selection. So I’ll choose Edit and then Stroke and then let’s select a darker version of this color for the stroke. And we’ll stroke it in the center. And we’ll stroke it by 2 pixels and just click Ok. So there’s my shape and now I can deselect my selection using Ctrl D or Command D on the Mac. So now I have my shape I’m ready to create my half-drop repeat. To create a half drop repeat I have to break this up into four pieces and put it in the corners of the image. Luckily Photoshop can do that for me. So I’m going to start by making a duplicate of this layer and I do that by dragging and dropping it onto the New Layer icon. So I now have two copies of the image. I’m going to turn off the background copy so I have only the top version visible. And now I’m going to choose a filter that’s going to do all the splitting work for me, Filter Other Offset. And the offset filter will break the shape up for me. All I need to do is to tell it what half the distance is of the vertical and horizontal size of this image. Now I set up my image to be 100 pixels by 100 so half of that is 50 x 50. And all I need to do is type 50 and 50 into these boxes. And you can see that Photoshop has now broken this image up into the required pieces. I set the undefined areas to wrap around and just click Ok. And there is the breakup for my half drop repeat. And all I need to do now is to drop this middle shape back into position. And this is exactly the pattern I need for a half drop repeat. So I’m going to choose Select All and then Edit Define Pattern. And I’m just going to click Ok. I could call it something if I want to. I’m not going to bother at this stage. Let’s hide this. And now let’s create an image with that half drop repeats in it. So I’m just going to get rid of these tools over here and let’s create a brand new image File New. Let’s choose a US paper, let’s do it letter size. But I’m going to do it landscape. No background, we’ll just do a transparent background and click Ok. And here’s our image that we’re now going to fill with our half-drop repeat. And we do that using Edit Fill. And here we have in the Fill dialog the option of choosing a Pattern. And your pattern is always going to be the very last one in the list. It’s the last one because you just created it and click Ok. And here’s our half-drop repeat. Now I’m just going to drop a layer in behind this and we’ll fill it with white so I’ll just make white my foreground color, Alt Backspace or Option Delete on the Mac. And there we have our shape filled with our half drop repeating pattern. Now if that’s not the half drop repeat that you wanted but it’s too small or too large we could use a different way of doing this. I’m going to choose Layer New Fill Layer Pattern. I’m going to create it just as pattern fill layer, just click Ok. And now what we’re doing is we’re filling it with our pattern. But since we decided our pattern was either too small or too large, let’s say it was too small, we can now scale it up to 200 percent by typing 200 percent in here and click Ok. And now we have a pattern that is much larger than the original. So there are different options that you have for using your half-drop repeat pattern once you’ve created it in Photoshop.
I use patterns a lot in Photoshop to fill backgrounds and to apply effects to my images. Problem is that ahead of time I never really know how big the pattern needs to be. If you fill an image with a pattern using Edit > Fill then you get the pattern in the image but at the size it is in the pattern swatch so you get zero control over it.
Instead, if you prefer to add your pattern in a scalable way, apply it using a fill layer. To do this, choose Layer > New Fill Layer > Pattern, click Ok and then select your pattern to fill the layer with.
You will see a Scale slider and you can use this to scale the pattern to suit the image.
If you don’t want it to stay a fill layer, right click the pattern layer and click Rasterize Layer to rasterize it so that you can then do other things with it.
While it remains a pattern fill layer you can double click the layer and rescale the pattern if desired.
