Applying A Saved Pattern

There are a number of ways you can apply a pattern:

• Use the Edit>Fill command. Going this route enables you to additionally specify the opacity of the fill and the blending mode.
• Use the Paint Bucket tool. You have options on the Options bar for not only opacity and blending mode, but also Tolerance and Contiguous. Tolerance means that the pattern filled using the Paint Bucket will overwrite existing layer pixels— the higher the Tolerance, the more completely the tool fills existing pixel areas with the pattern. Tolerance is useful for confining pattern fills to only specific colored areas in your document; suppose you have a pink and green checkered design and only want to fill the pink squares. Contiguous means that the Paint Bucket tool only fills areas where pixels touch one another. Unchecked, non-contiguous filling fills all areas of similar color to the area you click the tool over.

• Use the Pattern Stamp tool. In addition to opacity and blending mode, you can set Aligned or unaligned pattern stroking. Don’t get the idea that you can randomly paint with the saved pattern in unaligned painting mode— the pattern you apply is continuous, but if you have different brush settings defined such as Jitter Size, unaligned changes your brush strokes, but not the pattern application. You also have an Impressionist option on the Options bar, so you can apply the pattern as an abstract series of blobs. This is not a good option for creative individuals and it’s about as artistic as the Art history brush.

• You can apply a pattern to a layer by choosing Pattern from Adjustment layers on the Layers palette. This is an extremely useful feature because unlike other procedures, a Pattern Adjustment layer can be scaled before you create it, using the Scale feature in the Pattern Fill dialog box that appears after you add the Adjustment layer. The previous three methods offer no scaling option
• A method that offers perhaps the greatest editing capility after applying a pattern is through Layer?New Fill Layer?Pattern, which I’ll discuss later in this chapter. A Pattern layer is created with a corresponding transparency mask so you can make different areas invisible by using any painting tool.So open a new document with Transparent Background Contents@@make it 1024 by 768 pixels in dimensions so you can clearly see the pattern repeat. Follow these steps:

1. Choose Edit>Fill.
2. In the Fill dialog box, choose Pattern from the Use drop-down list.
3. Click the Custom Pattern drop-down and then choose your saved pattern from the icon list. It will be on the last row, last column. Click OK.
4. A background for the pattern that contains transparency would be nice. Click the New layer icon on the Layers palette; Drag the layer’s title down beneath the current layer.
5. Choose a pleasing foreground color by clicking the foreground color swatch on the Toolbox. I used pale cream but choose any color you like— it’s your design.
6. Press Ctrl/cmd+A and then Alt/Opt+Backspace to fill the bottom layer with foreground color. In figure 4, my own version looks pretty good. I think I’ll print 100 copies and do the basement.