photo by: Cierpki via sxc.hu
Do you want to fluidly zoom in and out of your project with the scroll wheel of your mouse? Well you’re in luck because in Photoshop this can be activated in Preferences. To go to your General Preferences, press Ctrl + K on a PC and Command + K on a Mac and check the Zoom with Scroll Wheel checkbox and press OK. Now you can zoom in and out of your images using just your mouse.
Labels: Adobe, how to, Photoshop, scroll wheel, tip, trevor adobe, trevor payne, Zoom
Categories:photoshop, trevor tip
Create the Droste Effect in Photoshop CS4 or CS5 or CS5.5 (not supported in CS6). Uses Bender and the Droste Filter.
Check out all our tutorials on our YouTube channel.
Complete transcript of this video:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. I’m going to show you here how to create the Droste effect using Pixel Bender in Photoshop. Now you need Photoshop CS4, CS5 or CS5.5. This does not work at the time of recording with Photoshop CS6. Before we start creating the Droste effect let’s have a look and see what it is that we’re trying to achieve. And this is the Droste effect that we’re going to create. And you can see it’s just a set of repeating images inside of each other. They’re actually based on a cocoa company’s advertisement. Their box had the cocoa packet being repeated within itself. And it’s been named the Droste effect because of that. Now we’re going to do it using Pixel Bender which is not being supported in Photoshop CS6. And in the description of this video on YouTube you’ll find that there is details about where you can get Pixel Bender and how to install it. So I’m assuming that you’re working with Photoshop CS4, CS5 or CS5.5 and that you have Pixel Bender installed and the Droste filter installed. So let’s get going with this. Let’s just put this image aside and we’ll go and get our original image. As I said it works particularly well when you have somebody off center so let’s just zoom out of this image a little bit. And the first thing we’re going to do is to add some extra area around the image. And I’m going to do this using the crop tool. So I’m going to select the crop tool, select over the image and then hold Alt or Option and then just drag out to create some extra canvas around the area of this image and just click the checkmark here. Now the canvas has come in with the current background color which has suited me really well because that gives me a white edge. Let’s flip these colors around and let’s go and do the same thing. Again, Alt or Option, and this time I’m only going to add a very small black canvas. Now you can do this any way you like. I just want to do it the quickest way possible. So now we have an image that is a black and white frame around our image. We’re going to go and see just how big this image is, reading it off with Image, Image Size. And the image is 1,076 by 905. Now this is an important because the filter needs to know this. So you’ll want to write this down. And we’re ready to get started with the filter. So we’re going to choose Filter and then Pixel Bender and then Pixel Bender Gallery. Now we already have the Droste filter selected. If you haven’t used this filter before you’ll probably have something like Cassini so you’ll just want to go down and select Droste. And this is the Droste effect. And we’re just going to first of all regardless of what it looks like here we’re going to start with entering the values that we read off for the size of the image. So it’s 1,076 by 905. And then we’ll adjust things like the radius inside and radius outside when we actually need to. We’re going to leave strands ate 1 and periodicity at 1. Strands and periodicity are the number of times that this will rotate. So if we send it up to 2 you’ll see that we get something that’s actually got two rotations. We don’t want that for this effect. We really only want one. And periodicity at 1 is fine too. The zoom is going to allow us to zoom in or out of this image. And at the moment we’re just going to leave zoom all the way out. Center is going to center the image itself. So when I drag on this the image rolls over, not the center of the actual portion of the image that we’re working with. You can see that if I just center shift I’m getting a very different effect on the image. Now center shift is something that I typically will adjust because I want to make sure that she is sitting opposite the image and the image is not actually over the top of her which it would be here. I’m going to adjust the rotation because at the moment it’s rotated at an angle and I really want it straight. So I’m going to rotate it a bit so that she is straight up and down. And having done that I want to bring the center of the image down. So I’m just going to adjust the vertical and perhaps also the horizontal so that I get the effect that I’m looking for. And I can combine that with zoom. Background RGBA is just the background of the image if this were showing any background, which it’s not. And levels and levels start you just don’t need to be working with at all. Transparent inside just makes it circular so we don’t want to use that. There’s really nothing below these settings that we’ve been working with that we really even want to see. So let’s just check and make sure that we’re getting the result that we want. Perhaps adjust these radius values to get a bigger image. And I’m thinking I like that a bit better, straighten it up with the rotate, perhaps move the center a little bit. And when we’re happy with the result that we’ve got, we’re just going to click Ok. And there’s our finished Droste effect. If we added some more levels we would see some more repeats in here. You can see that the repeats have sort of stopped. So we could go back and add more levels and that would give us a better result. Let’s just go and do that because all our settings will be still in place. And so what we’ll do is we’ll just increase the number of levels here and click Ok. And that’s giving us more repeats in the image here. But there’s the Droste effect filter created using the Pixel Bender plug-in in Photoshop CS4, CS5 and CS5.5. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. If you liked this video please give it a thumbs up in YouTube. You’ll find more video tutorials on my YouTube channel and look out at projectwoman.com for more tutorials and articles on Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightroom.
Labels: Adobe Photoshop, cs5, cs5.5, droste, effect in photoshop, Helen Bradley, how to, Photoshop, video tutorial, YouTube
Crop an image to a heart shape or any other shape in Photoshop. Uses a filled shape and a clipping mask.
Check out all our tutorials on our YouTube channel.
Complete transcript of this video:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to crop to a heart or any other shape in Photoshop. Before we get started on this technique let’s just have a look and see what the end product is going to be. You can see here that I have an image of my cat. And what I’m going to do is to cut her face out in a heart shape. Now in Photoshop Elements this is relatively easy to do because there’s a cookie cutter tool that you can use. In Photoshop it’s not that easy. So we’re going to go through this step by step so that you know exactly how to do it. So let’s get started. I’m going to open up a duplicate of this image. And the shape that we’re using is a heart but this could be any shape at all. So it doesn’t have to be a heart and this process is going to be the same for any shape. The first thing we’re going to do is convert the background into a regular layer. And do that your favorite way. I’m just going to double click the layer and click Ok. And now I’m going to go and get my heart shape. So I’m going to click on the custom shape tool here, and I’m going to select a shape. Now I’ve already selected the heart I want to use but let’s have a look and see. There’s a couple of hearts here. There’s one in the sort of card collection, but I don’t actually like that very much. It’s a really sort of weird shape that one. I prefer this one here so I’m just going to select it, and then let’s go and add a new layer. So I’ve just added a new layer. And let’s go and select a color. Now it can be any color at all, and I’m going to make it this sort of black. It doesn’t matter what color it is. And we’re going to use pixels so this is really important this bit, the pixels bit. In earlier versions of Photoshop there’s actually three icons here and you want to select the one that is pixels. And I’m just going to draw my heart shape. And if it’s not in the exact right position I’m just got a hold the Spacebar as I draw the shape so that I can move it around. And this is actually a nicer shape so once I’ve finished drawing and I’m just going to let go. And now I have a black heart shape right over the top of my cat. It doesn’t matter what this color is because it’s about to disappear. It does matter that the order of these two layers is the wrong way around. So I’m just going to drag the bottom layer up over the top layer. So the photos are on top and the heart is underneath it. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to cut the photo to the heart shape and we do that using a clipping group or clipping mask. So with this layer selected I’m going to choose Layer, Create Clipping Mask. You see here that there is a keystroke that’s Alt Ctrl G. That’s something we could use as well. But what this does is it cuts the photo into the shape of the shape below. So if this were a star than we’d have a star shape. So essentially that’s all you need to do. If you’re already to go, go now because you know how to create a heart shape from an image. If you want to finish it off nicely than hang around and we’re going to finish it off. The way we’re going to finish it off is by adding yet another new layer, and we’re to drag it to the very bottom. And what we’re going to do here is to fill this with a nice color. So I’m going to choose a color of pink because this is a sort of Valentine theme. My foreground color is pink. I have the bottom layer selected. I’m going to Alt Backspace on the PC, Option Delete on the Mac, to fill it with pink. Now we have our heart shape image over pink we can crop it. So I’m just going to crop it to size. And we’ll come in a bit on the edge here too. And now we want that nice finishing touch that we had on the original image. Let’s go and see the original image. You can see that this one’s got dimension and ours is very flat. If you want that dimensional look what we’re going to do is we’re going to add a drop shadow. And we’re going to do it to this heart layer because we want to the drop shadow to follow the heart shape. Here is the layer effects tool, the layer style tool. I’m going to click here and choose Drop Shadow Now my drop shadow at the moment is black. I would prefer a color that is similar to this pink but perhaps a bit darker than it. So let’s just go and get a darker version of our pink. We’re on multiply blend mode which is a good blend mode. I don’t like the angle of light. I prefer my light to be cast in this direction. And you can see that I can now drag my drop shadow around to place it where I want it to be. It’s a bit harsh so I’m going to soften it. Now this is where Photoshop is a little confusing. I think they’ve labeled these really wrongly because size actually adjusts the feathering and spread really adjusts the size. So we don’t want it to have a very big size or spread, but we do want it to have a nice feathering so I’m going to adjust the size to suit there. And on the other one I added an inner glow so I want to grab inner glow here. I again changed the color, this time sampling the pink from the image and going for a lighter pink for my inner glow. And then we’ve got it screen blend mode so that’s going to work nicely. But we do need to increase the size here and probably increase the choke a bit. And we just wanted to blend that around the edge and click Ok. So this is an effect that you can create with any shape in Photoshop. You can put any shape in here. You can put your photo on top. You’re going to add a clipping mask or create a clipping mask with Layer. And this will say Create Clipping Mask. At the moment it says Release because that’s what we would be doing at this point because we already have clipping mask created and we’re just dropping a filled layer below it. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this Photoshop video. If you liked this video please would you give it a thumbs up so that others know that it’s a good video. Look out for more videos on my YouTube channel and look at projectwoman.com for more tutorials about Photoshop.
Labels: Adobe, crop, cut out picture, frame, Helen Bradley, how to, mask, Photoshop, shape, video tutoial, YouTube
Create a spot color or isolated color effect in Photoshop. The image is black and white and only a portion of the image is in color. Learn how to do this and how to get started with masks as you do this.
Check out all our tutorials on our YouTube channel.
Complete transcript of this video:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to begin to use masks in Photoshop and I’m assuming that you’ve never used a mask before. And so that we actually create something in this tutorial we’re going to use it for a spot color effect. Before we get started on actually introducing what a mask is let’s have a look at the effect that we’re looking at here. This is my original image and it was shot in color on a very wet night in Wales. And what I’ve done is converted the image to black and white but I’ve left this person in the middle of the image in color. And I’ve done it in such a way that we can edit it. So if I didn’t make the selection correctly to begin with I can adjust it at any time. I can also remove the effect. So you can see here I’ve removed the mask here and the image has been reverted to fully black and white. I can reinstate the mask and this converts the image into black and white but leaving this person in color. This is a black and white adjustment layer here, a very simple adjustment layer. But because I’ve got a mask here I’m able to control where the color is on the image. And with masks you can paint with black and white. Black will reveal the layer underneath or the color underneath and white hides it. So if I get a really big brush right now, let’s go and get a really big brush on this image, and just see what happens when I paint on that mask. Can you see that I’m bringing color back into the image because I’m painting was black. If I paint with white I’ll removes the color from the image. I’m painting on the mask so I have the mask targeted but my paint is being painted onto the image itself. So I’m painting here. You can see that the color is going on the mask and we’re poking a hole in this black and white layer to see the color below. If we change to paint in white we’re removing it so we’re seeing what is on this particular layer. So now that we’ve seen what we’re aiming for let’s go and see how we could achieve that result with another image. Here I have another image. This one was shot in Cambridge. And I’m just going to size it down. And to make a start on this image we’re going to convert it to black and white using an adjustment layer. I’ll choose Layer, New Adjustment Layer, black and White and click Ok. And now I can make my black and white adjustment. But because my phone boxes are going to be colored red later on I’m not worried about the color in the phone boxes but I am worried about how the black and white is converted in the image around the edges. So I’m just going to focus on these edges. I do want it to look a little bit dark. So I’m probably going to go to the black end of the scale on most of these. And there’s my black and white image. And now we’re ready to add the color back into it. There any number of ways that we can bring the color back into the image. I’m going to show you a couple of them. Because we created a new adjustment layer you can see that there’s already a mask in place. So we can use this mask just by painting on it. Because it’s white that’s automatically telling us that we’re seeing just the black and white elements in the image. So if we start painting with black, and I’m just going to choose a paintbrush to use, I’m going to choose a slightly softer one to start off with. Now if we paint with black on the mask we’re going to start seeing the color appear underneath. And if we go too far then we can paint over it by painting in white. And you can see that we would really need a harder edge brush to really get a good effect here. But we could get a soft effect if we wanted to with this sort of almost not really quite transparent but it almost is in the edges brush. So I could just brush that effect on. It’s not fully opaque at these edges but it’s still giving me a spot color effect. Now I’m just going to trash that mask, drag it off and I’m going to delete the mask. At any time I want to add a mask I can just click this Add Layer Mask icon and that will add it to an adjustment layer or to a regular layer. Now let’s turn off this entire adjustment layer. Let’s go to the background layer and let’s use the quick selection Tool to select over these telephone boxes because this is another way that we could mask things. And now because I have my selection in place we can go back to our adjustment layer, turn it on, make sure I have the mask selected. I have black as my foreground color, I can Alt Backspace, Option Delete on the Mac to fill the mask with the black color that then shows the red through it. If I press Ctrl or Command D I’ll deselect the selection. And now I can zoom into areas that I think may need to be fixed a little bit, move them into position and go and get my black paintbrush. I’m going to make it a fairly hard edge paintbrush because the edges of these phone boxes are pretty hard. And I’m just going to paint over these edges and just make sure that in every place that I created my mask or my selection that everything is working correctly. I’ve actually got some color here so I’m going to switch colors by pressing X to make white my foreground color. I’m just going to tidy up a little area here where I had too much of the background color. And now I’ve gone the other way, again press X and this time bring it back in by painting with black. I’m painting on the mask. Although I’m using the image, I’m actually physically painting on the image but it’s appearing on the mask layer. And again I can just check around here to make sure that I have everything looking the way I want it to look. Let’s just zoom out again. Now there’s another way that I could have created this entire effect and that would have been to have made a duplicate of this background layer, Layer, Duplicate Layer. And I could have converted this to black and white just using Image, Adjustments, Black and White. Now for this one I’m just going to select the default adjustment. And now I’ve got a black and white layer on top of a color layer. Again I can add my mask here and I could paint on that with the paintbrush and black paint to bring my color back in or I could go to this layer and make my selection on this layer just as we did earlier. I’ll just go and quick mask this, really quick mask it. This is a very quick and dirty mask this one. Ok and then let’s go back into this layer and because I have this selection made, in fact it needs to be a little bit better made, I can just Alt Backspace, Option Delete on the Mac to again mask this layer. And then we can go back and tidy it up with the paintbrush and just paint over any areas where we want to bring back the color from the layer underneath. So this is done with two layers, one of which is black and white and one of which is color. But you could do it with an adjustment layer. There are lots of different ways to do it. It’s this Add Mask icon that allows us to add a mask. We’ll always put the mask on a top most layer because we want to poke a hole through this layer to see the one below. We’ll paint with black or white on the mask, and we can also paint with shades of gray. So let’s go and get a shade of grey here. It’s under my paintbrush so let’s see what happens when I paint with it. What we get is part of the current layer here but not all of it. So you can see I’m getting a mix here of the layer below and this layer because I’m painting with gray. Anywhere I paint with black I’m going to get only the layer below. Anywhere I paint with white I’m only going to get this particular layer. So there’s an introduction to masks by creating a spot color effect which is fully editable. Provided we save this as a PSD file, the image is going to be editable at any time by just painting on that mask. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. If you liked this video please give it a thumbs up on YouTube. Subscribe to my channel if you’d like to know when new videos are being released. And visit Projectwoman.com for more tutorials for Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightroom.
Labels: Adobe, Adobe Photoshop, Helen Bradley, how to, masks, Photoshop, spot color effect, YouTube
(Image by: Helen Bradley)
Working with lots of layers and a cluttered Layers palette? Find the layer that has the content you want to work with by targeting the Move Tool. Right click on a PC or Ctrl + Click on a Mac over the area that contains the content to work with. A list of all the layers under the cursor will appear – to select one, click on it in the list..
Labels: how to, Layers, multiple layers, Photoshop, tip, tip of the week, trevor adobe, trevor payne
Categories:photoshop, trevor tip
(photo by: roxinasz via www.sxc.hu )
Want to share your image with the world? To save an image for the web, choose File > Save for Web & Devices… , choose the file type, set the quality level, set the image size and save it. Your image will look great and it won’t slow down your website.
Labels: how to, Photoshop, save, tip, tip of the week, trevor, trevor adobe, trevor payne, Web, web optimized
Categories:photoshop, trevor tip
Learn how to create complex designs in Photoshop from simple shapes. Learn how to quickly rotate shapes, how to find and fill them and some ideas for using them in your own work.
Check out all our tutorials on our YouTube channel.
Complete transcript of this video:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to create complex designs from simple shapes in Photoshop. And this will work in practically any version of Photoshop. Before we start on this tutorial I’m going to show you exactly what you’re going to end up with so that you can get an idea as to what we’re aiming for. This is the kind of complex shape that we’re going to create in Photoshop, and we’re going to do it using Photoshop shapes. And what I’ve done is I’ve created a shape on this middle layer and then another shape on the top layer. And what I’ve done is actually blended the two together using a blend mode. But if you liked it you could actually just settle for this shape. You can take any part of this tutorial and use the pieces of it in your own art. So let’s just tuck this image away and let’s get started. And the first thing that we’re going to do is to create a brand new file. And I want to make this file a fixed size because I’m going to need to use some of these dimensions in a minute. And I’m going to make it 4,000 by 4,000 pixels because that’s going to make the math really easy. I’m going to set it to RGB color and I’ll have a white background. So that’ll be just fine. I’ll click Ok. The first thing I’m going to do is add a new layer to make sure that everything is kept separate of this background layer. And then I’m going to choose View and then New Guide and I’m going to add two guides. I’m going to add them at 50 percent horizontal and then another one at 50 percent vertical. And I’m going to choose View and make sure the Snap is turned on and that we’re snapping to guides. Now let’s go and find a shape. Now the shape tools in Photoshop CS6 that I’m using are a little different to in the earlier versions but they work pretty much the same as long as you just follow along here. Now the first thing I’m going to do is select a shape. Now this is the shape that I used earlier. So let’s just click on that to use it. I’m to set my foreground color. I’m going to make sure that I’m working in pixels. Now in earlier versions of Photoshop there’s icons here not a dropdown list. But what you want is Filled Pixels. And then I’m going to make sure my shape is selected, and I’m going to select my layer and draw my shape. And I’m going to set it away from the center line. But before I finish drawing it I’m just going to hold the spacebar and position it. Now I’m going to want it more accurately positioned but we can do that in a second, just let go and it’s filled. I’m going to click the move tool and I’m going to zoom in here because I want to make sure that this is in the exact right position. So yes it has snapped into the correct position. So I’m going to leave it there. Now I’m going to choose Layer, New Layer Via Copy. Now this is critical that you use these steps that we made a second layer and then we’re going to press Ctrl or Command T to get into Transform mode. Now we want to rotate this shape but we want to rotate it around the center point. So I’m going to grab this sort of marker here in the middle and drag it over the center point of my image. And I can check up here and this should say 2,000 pixels by 2,000 pixels. And if it’s not dead right I can come in here and change it. We want it to rotate around the exact midpoint. Then we need to change its angle. And I’m going to rotate this one 30 degrees. So each one of them is going to be rotated 30 degrees from the previous one. And I’ll click the checkmark. To save myself having to do that repeatedly I’m just going to press Ctrl Alt Shift T, which is Command Option Shift T on the Mac. And as you can see every time I press that key I get a rotated shape. I’ll do that until I rotate around the full 360 degrees. I’m then going to click on the first of these layers I’m going to Shift Click on the last of them so they’re all selected and then choose Layer, Merge Layers. And I could just press Ctrl or Command E. And that’s put that shape on a layer all by itself. And really that’s all we’re going to do to create this small complex shape. Let’s go and add a brand new layer, and now let’s go and find a different shape. Here’s the Custom Shape tool. Let’s go and find a different shape to use. Now earlier I used this shape. So let’s just select it. It’s sort of like a little rickrack design. I’m going to change my foreground color so it’ll be a little easier to see and I’m going to drag it on the image. Now I’m not concerned that it drags in proportion here. I think it’s more interesting perhaps if it doesn’t. I’m going to position it roughly where it goes, then zoom in with the Z or Zoom tool. I’m going to choose the Move Tool and make sure that it is directly on that line, so it’s snapped to that line. Now I’m going to make a new layer, Layer, New Layer Via Copy. With this new layer I’m going to make sure I have Move Tool selected. I’m going to move its center point so that its rotation point is right over the middle of my image. I’m going to check up here and if it’s not at 2,000 by 2,000, and X and Y at 2,000 and 2,000 I’m going to make it 2,000 and 2,000. And now I’m going to rotate it. And this one I’m going to rotate just 10 degrees and click the checkmark. And then I’m going to Ctrl Alt Shift T a number of times, in fact 35 times, for this to rotate around and finish its rotation. Then I’m going to grab this layer, click on it, scroll down to the last of these layers, Shift Click on it and then merge them with Layer, Merge Layers or press Ctrl or Command E. So let’s just zoom out here and this is our new shape. And this is the shape with the original one underneath. And now I can impact how these shapes relate with each other by for example setting an Overlay Blend Mode. You can see that we’re getting a different effect. And we can use all sorts of blend modes for these layers to control how they interact with each other to get different effects in our pattern. Now I like that one so I’m going to settle for that. And let’s just add one final layer to this. I’m going to click on the layer. I’m going to add another color. It’s going to be a dark purple. And this time I’m just going to add a circle, a filled circle. And I’m going to add it out here. Actually let’s make it an oval. Now a filled oval, I’ve just dragged the oval out. I need to fill it. The foreground color is the dark purple that I want. So I’m going to Alt Backspace, Option Delete on the Mac. Now I could if I wanted to add some additional circles. So if I wanted to align these or not align them as I wish I can do that. So let’s just add a few different shapes in here. And we’re going to use these to decorate our piece. So having created those shapes I’m now going to select the Move Tool and Ctrl Click on this layer so that I’m going to affect the entire layer. I’m just going to move this down so it’s centered. Now we’re going to do exactly the same thing as we did before, Layer, New Layer Via Copy. We’re going to use the free transform Ctrl or Command T. We’re going to move this transformation point into the center of the circle because we want everything centered nicely. We’re going to change this to 2,000 by 2,000 pixels in case it is not already set up to be that. And then we’re going to choose an angle. I’m just choosing an angle there is a factor of 360 degrees. So I’m going to choose 36 this time and click the checkmark. And now Ctrl Alt Shift T, Command Option Shift T on the Mac, to create my rotations. The same as before, select the first layer, Shift Click on the last of these layers, Ctrl or Command E to merge them. And now let’s see what we have. I’m going to zoom out. You can see that these dots have given us a little bit more visual interest in our design. And we can just run through these blend modes to see what sort of effect we can get with the blend mode. So I’m just running through down the blend mode list to see if any of these are giving me an effect that I like on my design. Well I kind of like the green that I’m getting with this exclusion. So there you have the way of creating a complex pattern in Photoshop. And all we’re doing is creating shapes and rotating them around a known center point. When I’m through I’m going to choose View, Clear Guides and that will get rid of the guides so that we can see our finished pattern. And we could use that as a repeating pattern in Photoshop. We could make it into a shape. We could do all sorts of things with it. We could even make it into a brush if we wanted to. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this Photoshop tutorial. You can find more of my tutorials on the this YouTube channel. And visit projectwoman.com for tips, tricks and articles on Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightroom.
Labels: Adobe Photoshop, fill, Helen Bradley, how to, Photoshop, rotate shapes, simple shapes, video tutorial
(photo by: Jürgen Eixelsberger)
Need to fill in a selection or a layer with your current foreground color. Press Alt + Delete on a PC (Option + Delete on a Mac) to instantly fill in your selection or layer with your foreground color.
Labels: fill, foreground color, Photoshop, tip how to, tip of the week, trevor adobe, trevor payne
Categories:photoshop, trevor tip
Learn how to make plaids and checks in Photoshop very quickly. See how to save the plaids as patterns and how to fill a shape with a pattern in all versions of Photoshop.
Check out all our tutorials on our YouTube channel.
Complete transcript of this video:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this video I’m going to show you how to create quick and easy plaids and checks in Photoshop. And this is going to work with pretty much any version of Photoshop. Before we start creating our plaid pattern let’s have a look and see exactly what we mean by creating plaids and checks. This is a simple sort of gingham style pattern that we’re going to create, and I’ve used it to fill a shape. And you’re going to see how you can do that as well. So let’s just tuck that away for now and let’s go and create our pattern. I’m going to choose File New and I’m going to create a workspace that is a fixed size and it’s going to be square. So I’m going to make this 200 pixels by 200 pixels because that’s going to be nice and easy to see. And I’m going to for this one create background contents as white because I actually want white as the basis of my pattern. So I’m quite happy to have white there. I’m going to choose View Rulers because I want to see my ruler right now. And I want to add two guides just to make sure that this is perfect. I’m going to choose New Guide and I’m going to make this 50 percent Horizontal and then add another one at 50 percent Vertical. These guides are going to help me draw in my shape. So I’m going to select the Rectangular Marque Tool and drag over one side of this shape. I need to work on a new layer so I’m going to click the New Layer icon here. And let’s choose a different color to the one we were working on before. Let’s create a sort of purple gingham this time. So I have purple selected as my foreground color, a brand new layer. I can fill this layer automatically with the foreground color by pressing Alt Backspace on the PC, Option Delete on the Mac. I’m going to add another layer. Still with this Marque Tool selected, this time I’m going to select the top area here, and I’m going to fill it again with the same color, Alt Backspace, Option Delete. And there’s the basics of my gingham check pattern. The only thing is is it doesn’t quite look the way it’s supposed to look yet. What I’m going to do is to make these layers both 50 percent opacity. And when I make both these layers 50 percent opacity you can see that we’re getting this sort of gingham check look. And I’m pressing Ctrl D, Command D on the Mac, to deselect my selection. To get rid of my guides I’m going to just click Clear Guides. So this is my gingham pattern. To make it a pattern I’m going to press Ctrl A or choose Select All to select everything and choose Edit and then Define Pattern. And I’m going to call this purple gingham and just click Ok. Now that pattern is created so I can just trash that document. But we might save it just for the moment because we might come back to that in a minute. Now let’s see how we could use our plaid pattern. I’m going to choose File New and create a letter size document with a white background. And here it is. Here I’m going to click the Custom Shapes Tool and I already have this rabbit shape selected. But you could select any shape. And I’m going to show you how to do this in any version of Photoshop because Photoshop CS6 is a little different. But the procedure I’m going to show you will work with any version. So with the custom shapes tool selected we’re going to make sure that we have path selected here. There are three options and they’re just different icons in earlier versions of Photoshop. But you want the Paths option. And we’re going to drag our rabbit shape. I’m holding Shift as I do so to constrain it to those proportions. Now in any version of Photoshop you can choose Layer New Fill Layer Pattern. Click to accept pattern fill and then you’ll find that it’s filled with the most recently created pattern which is the pattern we just created. If the scale of the pattern is too big, which it is really for me, I want to scale this down to 25 percent. I can just select Scale 25 percent and click Ok. And there is my rabbit filled with my pattern. Now in Photoshop CS6 you can do it a little differently. What we’re going to do is to choose a shape. And in this case we can fill our shape with a pattern. So now let’s grab our rabbit. And you can see that by default this is now created. It’s actually got a stroke on it. I don’t want any stroke. And with my pattern fill I can scale my pattern here in Photoshop CS6. So CS6 just makes it a little easier to do. But you can still do the same process in any version of Photoshop. Now let’s just go back for a minute to our original shape which is this one here. We could do some other things to make it a little bit more plaid like. For example I’m going to add a new layer, drag it to the very top, and I’m going to drag a very small stripe through here. And I’m going to fill it with a slightly darker version of this purple. So this is the foreground color, Alt Backspace, Option Delete. And then I could add another one again through here. This one I’m going to do twice. So I’m going to select the selection I have here and I’m going to Alt drag on it to create a couple of lines. Actually let’s do three. And I’m going to call that my new plaid shape. Having done that lets press Ctrl A to select everything, Edit Define Pattern. This is going to be my new pattern. It’s a little bit off in the spacing but I’m not going to worry too much about that. Let’s turn everything off here. Let’s go and grab a new shape. So for this one we’ll do a flower shape. And again, I’m just going to choose, well let’s go with Photoshop CS6. Let’s grab our pattern there and no stroke and just draw my flower shape holding Shift to constrain it to the shape. And you can see now that we have a more complex pattern fill for our object. We can again scale that down to 50 percent. But you can create plaids any way that you want to, and they’re going to fill any shape in Photoshop. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. You can find more of my video tutorials on this YouTube channel and visit projectwoman.com for more articles on Photoshop, Lightroom and Illustrator.
Labels: Adobe, checks, create, cs5, cs6, Helen Bradley, Photoshop, plaids, video tutorial, YouTube
