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Design Practice Photoshop - Fill Seeker

6/12/2013 9:07:34 AM

For some exciting tile repeat options, check out Photoshop’s’ Fill dialog

Repeat patterns are everywhere, from the pavements and brick walls outside to eth fabric weave of the clothes we wear. Photoshop can be used to create repeating patterns very easily: just make a rectangular selection of what you want to use as your repeating ‘tile’ and choose Edit > Make Pattern. Name it if you like, although it’s not necessary, and you’re done. Applying it is as simple as choosing Edit > Fill, choosing Pattern from the Fill dialog’s pop-up menu, and picking your custom pattern from the list. Your selection or even the entire Photoshop document will be flooded with your tiled pattern. Bosh.

Pavement artist: This image is entirely built from regular and scripted repeats in Photoshop – not one element was hand-placed

Pavement artist: This image is entirely built from regular and scripted repeats in Photoshop – not one element was hand-placed

It’s probably far from perfect, though. Notice those hard line edges where the tile repeats? It’s a simple repeat with no blending or flipping. Unfortunately, you can’t get Photoshop to do the kind of reflection tricks that Illustrator provides. Fortunately, you can set that up yourself before you make the pattern, so I’ll outline a quick and pretty easy way to do that.

Fill your boots: The Scripted Fill checkbox in Photoshop’s standard Fill dialog throws up some interesting pattern generation options

Make your selection, then copy it and choose File > New. Photoshop offers to make this new document the exact size of what you just copied, but double it instead: make it exactly twice as high and wide as Photoshop suggest. Click OK and then paste your copied graphic into this new window. Drag this up to snap into the top left corner, then paste again. This time, choose Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal and drag it to the top-right corner. Merge the two pasted layers together, duplicate this, and use the Transform menu choices to flip this duplicate vertically. Drag down, flatten the image, and you’re done: you’ve made a tile will repeat with no hard edges. All you need to do now is make this into a pattern. You don’t even need to make a selection first, as the pattern will be taken from the entire image if there’s no marquee area. The next creative step is to try making another pattern that’s twice the width and height of the first one. Apple the first to one layer and the second to the next, then experiment with opacity and blending modes to get the two layers interacting.

As all this show, Photoshop’s pattern-generating abilities aren’t as fine-grained and flexible as Illustrator’s, at least on the surface. But this isn’t where the options stop: the Scripted Fill option at the bottom of the Fill dialog throws some very interesting extras into the mix. Open the Fill dialog again and click the Scripted Patterns checkbox. Now you can pick from a short list of different fill styles that alter how each tile is placed into the fill space. The success of the final repeated pattern depends in part on the content of the pattern tile you choose. Cross Weave creates a staggered, under-and-over effect, and it works best with content that has some transparent areas. Failing that, the tile should be a perfect square or you’ll get holes across the artwork. Brick Fill does what you’d expect. Random is good for scattering things such as leaves around, but you might find it useful to make your tile out of lots of different leaves to keep it feeling realistic. The two jaw-dropping items, Spiral Fill and Symmetry Fill, are also ones that work best with patterns that have transparency.

Spiral bound: These two images were created using a custom script for pattern rotate

Spiral bound: These two images were created using a custom script for pattern rotate

If you’ve been playing along at home, you’’ have seen a big problem here. The Brick Fill, Cross Weave and Symmetry Fill scripted fill choices do what they promise, but they also throw in random changes with each tile iteration. Cross Weave changes bright, but the hue change of the Brick, Random and Symmetry choices is particularly jarring. The intention is obvious with Brick; many walls won’t loll totally uniform, with each individual brick slightly different from the next. But if you’re not trying to make an actual brick pattern (or you’re replicating eth kind of bricks that don’t vary that much in appearance, this is a bit of a deal breaker). Even if you want a traditional brick-with-variations appearance, the color range that’s used in the randomized hues is a bit of the fanciful side.

At this point, this feature probably feel more like a tech demo than final polished ability and, in fact, that’s pretty much what it is: a demo of something that’s designed to be open and modifiable, if you have the JavaScript chops to write your own. This is called the ‘Deco framework’, which Adobe describes as ‘a scriptable environment that is tailored for creating procedural patterns’. The Deco JavaScript files are in Presets/ Deco inside the Photoshop CS6 application folder, ready to be cracked open with a text editor. Excited yet? Probably not, but don’t worry, there are people who have already done this and made their work available to others.

Deco art: Chuck Uebele has written a script that tackles some of the hue issues with Scripted Fills

Deco art: Chuck Uebele has written a script that tackles some of the hue issues with Scripted Fills

Start with the details at bit.ly/deco scripting, a page from the Adobe Advanced Technology Labs outlines some of the Deco scripted patterns possibilities. Don’t worry much about the links to writing your own unless you really want to start with eth ready-mades. Eth Partial Plane Symmetry Fill zip archive by Richard Kain pushes things to interesting extremes, helping apply patterns using 17 different symmetry types. There’s an instruction document in the archive, although it’s difficult to open (it’s being fixed, but until then there’s a PDF of this file at bit.ly/partialplaneinfo).

Something that addresses the specific problems of the hue changes in Adobe’s bundled scripts has been made by Chuck Uebele. Go to uebelephoto.com/CS6_Fill.html and grab the Scripted Fill UI download. After it’s installed, it has to be invoked from the File > Scripts menu. As of version 1.2, some of the controls are a little jumbled in the interface, but once you’ve picked your settings and clicked Okay, the regular Fill dialog is opened, set to run the new Temp Fill Script item in the Scripted Patterns menu. Yes, it’s all a bit Heath Robinson, but it means you can customize the standard Deco scripts to behave the way you want – without having to write custom JavaScript. Frankly, I’m impressed.

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