2 Ways to Easily Make Seamless Patterns in Photoshop (Surface Pattern Design) 2022

I will show you 2 ways to make seamless patterns in Photoshop. You can make a seamless pattern using any photo. You can design your own seamless pattern with various shapes of your choosing. Use Photoshops Pattern Preview for Surface Pattern Design.

2 Ways to Easily Make Seamless Patterns in Photoshop

Today. I want to show you two ways to make a seamless pattern in Photoshop. First, we’ll see how you can generate a seamless pattern from any image. Then we’ll use Photoshops pattern preview to build our own seamless pattern from scratch. Let’s make a seamless pattern from this image. Like me, you probably have a lot of photos. You’d be surprised at the patterns you can make own the photos.

How to Make a Seamless Pattern from any Image

You already have. If your library panel is not displaying or it’s not on the side menu here, come up to window and where says libraries. Click on that. Make sure that you’re actually in one of your libraries so that you can see this plus button right here. Click on that and it says Extract from Image. I’m going to click there and our extract from Image panel comes up.

We have all these options up here. We can do shapes, color, themes, and gradients, but we’re going to do patterns. So you have a number of options for patterns. You see this triangle down here. You can move your image around so that you see that your pattern is changing when you select these other icons. You can see that your pattern options change.

I’m going to go to the first one here. You can also scale. You can see that your image changes as far as the color spacing in there. And you can also rotate your pattern. Once you find something you like, now you just click save to CC libraries. And you can see over here on the right, it says Capture pattern is the one that I just captured right now and you can close your window.

And so now you can use the pattern you just created in a variety of different ways. You could use it as a background. I just cut out this subject here and double-click on this pattern and it brings it right into my document. And I’ll put this below the subject. And you can make adjustments from here, make the pattern fit in any way you like.

And also double click on the properties and the pattern fill change the scale, make it smaller, change the angle, and something like that. Many uses for it. If you haven’t subscribed yet, hit that subscribe button and turn on notifications and you won’t miss any of my tutorials. Besides making seamless patterns from an image. Another interesting way to make seamless patterns is by designing your own pattern with any kind of shapes.

You can use Photoshop Shapes panel, which is over here, which here you have all these shapes that you can use to make your seamless pattern, and you can even make a seamless pattern out of brushes. I have some images of a butterfly and some flowers, and I want to make something like a surface design. I already have my images cut out of a white background, but I’m going to show you the method.

How to Cut Out an Image Using Channels

I used to cut out one of these images. So we’re going to use channels to cut out these flowers and the green leaves. Go to my channels, panel. I’m going to turn on each channel individually and see how much detail there is in the image. When I do so, there’s two blue is the green and here’s red. So I think I’m going to choose red to me it as the most information between the other two channels.

And I know I’m going to have to modify this channel. So I’m going to make a copy of it. Here’s a copy. And since we’re on a white background, I want to invert my red copy channel right here, command +I. And so the white areas are the areas that are actually going to be selected. And we’re going to want to make those white areas even brighter.

We’re going to do a couple of things. First we’re going to come up to edit, fill and we’re going to fill the contents with white and the mode here could be a soft light or overlay. Overlay a little bit stronger and the opacity of 100. So if it’s too much or gets too bright and everything’s really distorted, you can come back here and redo this.

Either drop the opacity or choose soft light. I’ll say OK, so you see those white areas got brighter. We could add to that brightness a little bit more by using image, adjustments and bringing in a levels adjustment. And you can use this to get those areas brighter. You see they’re brightening as I’m moving the sliders just to get more of that area that we know is going to be selected.

And we’re going to say, OK, when we copy this red channel, we created another Alpha Channel because we knew that we were going to have to modify that channel. So now I’m going to turn on all the channels, I’m going to come back to my layers panel. Now I want to load that selection. I want to load my channel as a selection.

So if I come up to select, load selection, where it says channel, it says read copy that’s already selected for me. And I say, OK, and you see now I have a selection out of that channel and now I need to do is come down here to layers panel and add a layer mask.

And another little tip with our selection. If you hit Alt/Option and click on your Layer Mask, here’s your layer mask in the areas that are a little bit darker to help with your selection, you can lighten them up if your brush is on overlay, you see there’s an overlay mode at the top and paint with a white brush and you can paint on

your image some of these dark areas. And since it’s on overlay, it’s not going to go outside of your selection. So you can go through your image here and refine this. When you do this method. And when you’re done, you just hit alt/option, click on your layer mask and there’s your image all cut out. So now with your image cut out, now’s a good time to make any color adjustments.

If you wanted to add like for instance, a hue and saturation adjustment layer if you wanted to bring the overall saturation up or you can adjust any of the colors individually. I can use this hand right here and click on that. I can add more saturation to the green. Just make adjustments to your image so that you can use it in your pattern.

How to Make a Seamless Pattern using Shapes, Surface Pattern Design

So now I’m going to create a new document. So I can start designing my seamless pattern. So I’ll come up to file new. Now I want to make a document that’s big enough in case I want to print it. So then I can crop it to different sizes without having to redo it every time I want a different size. I’m going to go for a 12 by 12 document.

Now I’ll put that in inches and resolution 300 and you can make this document any size you want to it. Now just say create. And to help us to make our seamless patterns, if I come up here to view there’s something called Pattern Preview, so I’ll click on that and says Pattern Preview works best with smart objects. OK, we’ll take care of that.

Say OK, so right here in the middle you see a square. So now the time to get your images and drag them in the middle of this square and go over here with the butterfly is, you know, I’m going to get that in. I’m going to take it into the middle of this square. And as you can see, as I put that image in the middle of the square, it started repeating.

So now I’m going to make my butterfly layer a smart object. All right. Click on that and say Convert to smart object, because I know I’m going to be resizing it once I click on my butterfly layer and say, command +T. Grab this handle and I can resize my butterfly and you see that it’s resizing it all across my repeated pattern.

And I’ll click OK, make this a little bit bigger and I can move my butterfly around. And as you can see, it repeats even across my boundaries of this pattern preview. And now I want to bring in some of my other objects and now I can bring this other flower in, drop it in my pattern preview. I’m going to make it a smart object, I’ll hit command +t here again.

I can resize and move my shapes, say, OK, it’s dragging my other shape. Make this a smart object also. And you say command T and resize that. I can angle it and everywhere else it angles and resize it at the same time. If I want to add any more of these flowers I can go to my layers panel and I’m going to say new smart object via a copy and move that layer and say command+T to reposition it.

And you can see that it automatically repeats everywhere else and it can keep on adding more and saying Command+T repositioning them anywhere I like. And if I make this zoom out, you can see that I have my repeating pattern. Obviously, I didn’t take the time to really design this, but here I put this together quickly so that you can see that this is an easy way to make a pattern.

And now if I want to add a background, I can turn all these off and drag a background in and say command+T make this background big enough so that it covers all the squares. I want to get out these lines. You see, I have lines where I put in my background. You use your clone stamp to sample all these areas and get rid of this line and get rid of that line as best you can.

Turn on all your images again. So now that I’ve made my repeating pattern come up to view and uncheck pattern view, I’m going to merge all my layers. I’ll make a stamp visible layer, shift option command E all my layers are merged to a layer on the top and now I can come up to edit and down to where says define pattern going to name my pattern butterfly and say OK.

And now to use this repeating pattern, I’m going to create a new document new and I’m just going to create a square 1080 by 1080 document, say OK. Come down here to the Layers panel and add a pattern adjustment layer. And now here is the pattern that I created select that I can scale it down to get more of my patterns repeated and angle it something like that and say, OK, and now I can use my pattern.

And that’s how you make a repeating pattern with shapes or images that you cut out from a background and make a seamless pattern out of it. If you want more tutorials just like this, click on one of the videos on the screen. Now, if you haven’t already, like share and subscribe and remember, it’s never too late to learn.

Thanks for watching.

See my previous blog article here ➡️ Beyond Colorize Black and White Photos in Photoshop with Neural Filters

Check out my photography website here ➡️ https://www.charlescabreraphotography.com