From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

691 Exploring regular molecule patterns

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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691 Exploring regular molecule patterns

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- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Last week I showed you how to create a kind of Voronoi diagram using the gradient tool, which results in a random pattern of what looked to me like thriving molecules. Well this week, we're going to drop the random bit and we're going to create a regular hex pattern of molecules that we can then turn around and blend to create these elaborate effects. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right here's the final version of the image opened up inside Photoshop. We're going to be creating it from scratch, and so if you'd like to join me, go up to the File menu and choose the New command. Or you can press Control + N or Command + N on the Mac, and regardless of the appearance of your New Document dialog box, set the unit of measure to Pixels, and then if you want to get the same results as me, set the width value to 2,900 pixels and the height to 1,968. This by the way is going to be a work of vector-based artwork, so you can always upsample the image at no cost later on down the line. Now notice I've set the resolution to 300 pixels per inch. It really doesn't actually matter. You do want the color mode to be set to RGB color however. If you go with CMYK you're going to get some very drab results. Then notice that I've set my background contents to black, and now I'll twirl open the Advanced Options right here, and set the Color Profile to Adobe RGB. That way we'll get some nice vivid colors. And now I'll go ahead and create that new document. All right now as I was saying we're going to be creating a vector-based piece of artwork, and so drop down to the Shape Tool and select the Ellipse Tool from the fly-out menu. And then you just want to click any old place inside the image window to bring up the Create Ellipse dialog box, and set both the width and height values to 600 pixels, like so. Now in my case, white was my foreground color and so Photoshop has automatically filled the circle with white. In your case it might be black or some other color. Really doesn't matter. If you're working in Photoshop CC, you want to click on this fill swatch over here on the far left side of the options bar, and set it to Gradient. And then you want to change the style from Linear to Radial, and I want the gradient to start white in the center, and end black around the outside, and so I'll go ahead and click on this reverse icon. All right now I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to accept that change. Now, for those of you who are working in Photoshop CS6 or earlier, you're not going to see that gradient option, so here's how you want to work. I'll go ahead and back up here, and then I'll drop down to the FX icon at the bottom of the Layers panel, and I'll choose Gradient Overlay. And then you want your gradient to be set to black to white is going to work out nicely, and the blend mode should be Normal. Notice that I've changed the style to Radial, and then if you end up with this result right here, then you want to turn on the Reverse checkbox. All right so no matter what, you want to go ahead and change the blend mode from Normal to Lighten, so that you get the shapes to interact with each other. Right now it's not going to make a difference, but it will as soon as we have more than one circle going. I'll also rename this layer circle, and if you're working with Photoshop CS6 or earlier, and you've got that Gradient Overlay effect, then double-click on an empty portion of the layer to bring up the Layer Style dialog box, and then turn on this first checkbox, Blend Interior Effects as Group, and click OK. All right now at the risk of confusing things, if you're working in Photoshop CC, then you just need to go with the Lighten mode. You don't need to worry about that checkbox. All right now we need to make a duplicate of this circle by switching to the Move Tool, very important, which you can get by pressing the V key. And then you want to press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac and drag the circle while pressing the Shift key as well over to the right until you see an interaction that looks good. And notice in my heads up displays that I'm seeing a horizontal movement of 450 pixels. At which point I'll release, so again I have the Shift and Alt keys down on the PC. That's the Shift and Option keys down on the Mac, and notice, thanks to the fact that the blend mode is set to Lighten, we're getting that molecular interaction that we saw last week. All right now that I know that I need to move this guy 450 pixels, I'm going to approach things a little differently by pressing Control + Alt + T. That's going to be Command + Option + T on the Mac, and what that does is take you into the Free Transform mode, while at the same time ensuring that you're going to create a copy of the shape. All right so notice up here in the options bar that I've gone ahead and turned on this triangular delta icon up here, and now I'll select the X value and I'll set it to 450 pixels just as we saw before. And now you can see why I went ahead and tested things out in advance, and that's because at least in this version of the software, I can't preview the effect on the fly. I'm just seeing the path outline without any contents. All right but I'll just go ahead and take a leap of faith by pressing the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac a couple of times to apply that change. All right now you want to continue duplicating that circle by pressing Control + Shift + Alt + T. That's Command + Shift + Option + T on the Mac, a bunch of times in a row, and we're actually looking for a total of eight circles. It's a little hard to tell what's going on with all these layer effects applied, so I'm going to hide the layer effects by pressing the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac and clicking this up pointing arrow to the right of the FX icon here inside the Layers panel. At which point I can see that I've got one, two, three, four, five, six circles. I need two more, so I'll just press Control + Shift + Alt + T, or Command + Shift + Option + T on the Mac a couple of times more until I have a total of eight. And you may want to just go ahead and count them to make sure. All right now I'll Shift + Click on the bottom circle so that all of the circles are selected, and then I'll click on the fly-out menu icon in the top right corner of the Layers panel and choose New Group From Layers, which will bring up the New Group dialog box. At which point I'll call this guy row one, and I'll click OK. All right now with the entire group selected, I'll go ahead and drag this row over until I can see its end, like so, and then I'll move it back a little bit, so that I can see the first one, two, three, four, five, six, seven circles, at least partially. You're not going to see all of them at a time. All right now we want to duplicate them down and to the left another 450 pixels. And so it's going to end up looking like this, and I'm making this happen by Alt or Option + Dragging, and then I'm going to create another row like so, and the reason I'm doing this is to show you that I have a hexagonal shape. So I'm going to be creating a hex pattern. The problem is, I want things to work out exactly right, which means that I need to duplicate the shapes by the numbers, but I don't know what the numbers are. You can't tell Photoshop as things stand now to move something 450 points in a specific direction. You have to know the amount of horizontal movement as well as the amount of vertical movement, and that would require, I believe some trigonometry, which I don't want to look up right now. So what I'm going to do instead is just undo those movements by pressing Control + Alt + Z or Command + Option + Z a couple of times. And then I'm going to go ahead and switch over to Illustrator. And the reason I'm using Illustrator, you don't have to by the way, you can just watch what I'm doing here, is because Illustrator knows how to move things in a specific direction. And so I can just grab the Rectangle Tool for example and draw a rectangle right there on the screen. So any old shape will do by the way, and I'll go ahead and make it red just so it stands out better, and now I'll switch back to my black arrow tool, the one that Illustrator calls the Selection Tool at the top of the toolbox, and I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to bring up the Move dialog box. And I'll tab down to the Distance value here, and I'll set it to 450. And then I'll set the Angle value not to 60 degrees, and by the way in case you're wondering why I would even come up with 60 degrees, it's because we're taking 360 degrees, which describes a circle, and dividing it by the six sides associated with a hexagon, and then you get 60 degrees. Problem is, that moves the guy up and to the right to the point that I can't even tell where it is anymore. I want to move it down and to the left, so I'm going to take 60 degrees and I'm going to add 180, like so, and that gives me an angle value of 240 degrees, which is exactly what I want. All right now you want to take note of these values, so write the horizontal value down, because it's pretty easy. It's just 450 divided by two, which is negative 225, because we're moving the shape to the left, but the vertical value is a little trickier. What I suggest you do with this one is just select it by clicking on the word Vertical and pressing Control + C, or Command + C on the Mac to copy it. Now, if you're working along with me, leave the Move dialog box up on screen, and then just go ahead and switch back to Photoshop, and now I'll jump a copy of this row by pressing Control + J or Command + J on the Mac. Then, I'll rename the bottom one row two, and with that row selected, I'll go up to the Edit menu and choose Free Transform, or you can just press Control + T or Command + T on the Mac, and in case you're wondering why I didn't just do a Control + Alt T or Command + Option + T, that particular shortcut does not work with groups. All right now you want to select that X value up there. Make sure delta is turned on, which is the triangle icon once again. And then set that guy to negative 225. Then, tab to the Y value and press Control + V or Command + V on the Mac. Now as you can see that moves it too far down, and that's because notice my unit of measure is points. I don't want that, I want pixels. So I'll delete the T and change it to an X, like so. Now I'm not seeing anything more than the transformation boundary. That's because this particular version of Photoshop isn't cooperating where the shape layers are concerned until I press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac a couple of times, like so. And now, we have one row perfectly aligned with another. All right now we're going to assign some layer effects to these rows, and so I'll select row one and then I'll drop down to the FX icon and choose Color Overlay. And if memory serves me, your ability to assign layer effects to a group started in Photoshop CS6. So older version of the software do not support this. But assuming you've got a fairly recent version of the program, then here inside the Layer Style dialog box, you want to click on the color swatch and you want to set the Hue value to 30 degrees. We're looking for a Saturation value of 100% and a Brightness value of 100% as well. At which point click OK and then you want to change the blend mode to Multiply, and we're looking for an opacity value of 100%. Now notice that we've got some problems right here. The color is leaking out of the molecules onto the second row. To prevent that from happening, go ahead and click on Blending Options right here, and then you want to switch the blend mode from Pass Through to Lighten. And finally, you want to turn on this checkbox Blend Interior Effects as Group. So you have to do both of those things in order to produce this effect here. If you skip either one of these options, for example if you go with Pass Through it's not going to work. All right so I'll switch this back to Lighten right here, and then I will go ahead and click OK. All right now let's colorize the second row by clicking on row two right there, clicking on the FX icon, and once again choosing Color Overlay, and this time I'm looking for a hue value of 210 degrees. Saturation and brightness values of 100% each are just fine. After which point I'll click OK and then change the blend mode to Color this time around. And now you've got to run those same steps again, because notice if I click OK, and then I grab row one and I Alt or Option + Drag it downward using my Move Tool once again in order to create a copy of the row, and then I move that row down to beneath row two like so, that the blue is leaking out onto the third row. All right that's not what I want, so I'll double-click on an empty portion of row two to bring up the Layer Style dialog box. I'll change the blend mode to Lighten right here and then I'll turn on this first checkbox, Blend Interior Effects As Group, and then I'll click OK. Now the thing is this new row one that's down here at the bottom is in approximately the proper location, but it's not exactly right. So I'm going to get rid of it by pressing the Backspace key or the Delete key on the Mac, and then I'll click on row one and Shift + Click on row two and what I want to do is create copies of them for rows three and four, and so I'll press Control + J or Command + J on the Mac in order to jump both of those layers. And then, I'll double-click on the words row one down here below. Here's a little bit of a time saver. I'll press the right arrow key to move my cursor to the right of the one, and I'll Backspace the one and replace it with a three. Here's the time saver. I'm going to press the Tab key to advance to the name of row two, and then I'll press the right arrow key and press Backspace followed by four in order to rename it as well. And so pressing the Tab key is a handy way to rename a bunch of layers at the same time. Now I'll Shift + Click on row three so that both row four and row three are selected, and now I have to figure out how far to move them. Which is where Illustrator comes back in. So, I will switch back to Illustrator. Still have my Move dialog box up on screen, and all I'm going to do is click after the vertical value right here and enter asterisk two and then press the Tab key in order to force Illustrator to do the math for me. And now I'll just select that value, that numerical value, without the unit, and I'll press Control + C or Command + C on the Mac, and I'll switch back over to Photoshop. I'll go up to the Edit menu and choose the Free Transform command, or you can just press Control + T or Command + T on the Mac, and then I'll select the Y value right there and I'll press Control + V or Command + V on the Mac. And this time, because I'm not pasting the PT for point, Photoshop is assuming I'm working in pixels. At which point I'll press the Enter key or the Return key a couple of times in order to accept that change. All right now we want to assign new colors to these rows by double-clicking on the Color Overlay effect for row three, and then I'll click on its color swatch and I'll set the Hue value to zero degrees, and that's it. Click OK and then click OK. This time around we don't have that problem where the red leaks out into the blue, and that's by virtue of the fact that we duplicated row one, so we still have those same style settings. All right now I'll double-click on the Color Overlay associated with row four. Click on its color swatch and change the hue value to 270 degrees, which is going to give us purple. At which point I'll click OK a couple of times to accept that change. And so notice the difference with the orange and red rows because we're using a multiply effect. Our brightest color is orange up here at the top, and red down here toward the bottom. Whereas with rows two and four, the brightest color is white, and that's because we set the blend mode to Color. All right now I'm going to Shift + Click on row one so all of the rows, rows one through four are selected, and then I'll drag these guys way up here, because I want to add a few more. That's because I want to duplicate all of these rows and I'm going to do that by pressing Control + J, or Command + J on the Mac to jump them, and then I'll scroll down to the first appearance of row one, right here, and I'll double-click on its name. Press the right arrow key, press Backspace, and replace it with a five. Then Tab down to row two and change it to row six. Tab down to row three, change it to row seven. Tab down to row four, and change it to row eight. Now you want to Shift + Click on row five so five through eight are selected, and now I want to move them downward, but again, by how much? Well, let's switch back over to Illustrator where the Move dialog box is still up on screen, and now I'll click after the Vertical value and enter asterisk two. And then I'll press the Tab key. At which point Illustrator returns this big enormous value. I don't care what it is, I'm just going to select it without the PT, press Control + C or Command + C on the Mac in order to copy it. Switch back over to Photoshop, go up to the Edit menu and choose Free Transform. And then make sure the triangular delta symbol is still selected. Then, click on the Y in order to select the Y value. Press Control + V or Command + V on the Mac in order to paste that value, and then press the Enter key or the Return key a couple of times in order to move those rows into place. All right now at this point I decided I wanted to change the colors of row five and seven while leaving six and eight the way they are. And so I'll double-click on the Color Overlay for row five, click on its color swatch and click into hue value and press Shift + Up Arrow a couple of times so that we have a hue of 50 degrees. Then click OK a couple of times, and that gives us a yellow as you can see right here. Then double-click on the Color Overlay associated with row seven. Click on that red color swatch and change the hue to 80 degrees, which gives us a kind of Chartreuse green. Then click OK a couple of times to apply that change. All right now I figure that's enough for one movie, so I'm going to press Shift + F in order to switch directly to the full screen mode, and then I'll go ahead and zoom on in as well. And that's how you create a perfectly spaced hex pattern of alternatingly colored rows of softly interacting molecules, which is the first step to achieving this particular effect here inside Photoshop. All right now if you're a member of lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning, I have a couple of followup movies in which I show you how to take a regular pattern of shape layers, and we're going to group, transform, and duplicate them in order to create these wildly colorful effects here made more lustrous by the high pass filter. If you're waiting for next week, we're going to take our technique over to Illustrator where our molecules will become cells. And by the way, don't forget to visit deke.com. Deke's Techniques each and every week. Keep watching.

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