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

950 Fixing a broken candy cane pattern

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

950 Fixing a broken candy cane pattern

- All right, now I'm going to show you how to fix a broken candy cane pattern. And how do we tell it's broken? Well, notice up here in the View menu, we have a new command, at least in Photoshop 2021, called Pattern Preview. And so if I go ahead and choose that command, Photoshop automatically repeats the pattern to show me what it looks like. Problem is, this is wrong, by the way. And that's because, at least as things stand now, the Pattern Preview command works best with smart objects. And so what I'm going to do is go over here to the Layers panel, shift click on the thick lines layer, so both thin and thick lines are selected, and then I'll right click on an empty portion of either of those two layers to bring up this big pop-up menu, and I'll choose convert to smart object. At which point you can see that things are indeed broken. Aren't actually this broken, which is why I'm going to return to the View menu choose Pattern Preview to turn it off, and then I'll once again, go back to the View menu and turn Pattern Preview back on. And now we're seeing the problem, which is that we have these gaps up here in the top left corner of the pattern tile, as well as down here in the bottom right corner. All right, now I need access to those original lines. I could get to them by double clicking on the thumbnail for this smart object in order to open the object in a new window. Problem is Photoshop has expanded the canvas and that is not going to work at all. And so I'll go ahead and close this smart object. And instead, I'll right click in an empty area of what is currently the thin lines layer, in order to, once again, bring up the pop-up menu, and I'll choose Convert to Layers. And that's going to bust up the smart object and give us access to those two layers once again, now inside of a layer group. And so I'm just going to go ahead and change the name of this group to candy, and then press the enter key, or the returning key on the Mac. And now notice that we have this thick lines layer, right here. That's the layer we want. We don't want the now misbehaving pattern preview to be turned on. And so I'll return to the View menu and choose Pattern Preview to turn it off. And then what you want to do is select the block arrow tool, the one that Photoshop calls the path selection tool, even though it has a keyboard shortcut of A for arrow, then click on that big thick line as selected, and we're going to create a couple of copies, one in the top left corner and another in the bottom right corner, just to fill things in. And so I'll press that keyboard shortcut of control+alt+T, command+option+T on the Mac. That's the only way to transform and duplicate this line. And now go up here to these x and y-values, on the left side of the Options bar. Turn off the triangular Delta icon, so we're working with absolute values. Notice that they're both set to 200 pixels. You may recall that the canvas measures 400 pixels wide by 400 pixels tall. So in other words, the center of the line is at the exact center of the canvas. What I want it to be is in the top left corner. So I'll change the x-value to zero. This is what you're looking for. And we want a y-value of zero, as well, after which point, press the enter key or the return key on the Mac, a couple of times to apply that change. Now we want another copy of that line in the bottom right corner of the canvas. And so I'll press control+alt+T, command+option+T, once again. And then, this time, we want to change the x and y-values to the same size as the canvas. So 400, then press the tab key. 400 for the y-values, as well, and then press the enter key or the return key on the Mac, a couple of times in order to apply that change. Now, if you want to see how things look, then you can go ahead and right click on an empty portion of this candy group right here. And once again, choose Convert to Smart Object and then go up to the View menu and choose Pattern Preview in order to see that, yes, indeed, we have filled in the top left and bottom right corners of the tiles, and as a result, we have a seamlessly repeating tile pattern. All right, I'm going to undo those last two changes by pressing control Z, or command Z on the Mac, which turns off the pattern preview, and then control or command Z again, which goes ahead and restores our original layers. Now I'll go ahead and click off that line to hide it. And then, I'll go to the Edit menu and choose Define Pattern in order to create a new pattern tile. This tile doesn't work is the name of this file, but that's not true anymore, so I'm just going to call this guy Good Candy, and then I'll click Okay, in order to accept that change. And now, if you were to go to the Windows menu and choose the Patterns command, in order to bring up the recently introduced patterns panel, you will see that we have a new pattern called Good Candy. And that is how you fix a broken candy cane pattern, here inside Photoshop 2021 and moving forward.

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