You want to learn how to make print ready seamless patterns
with Adobe Photoshop and generative AI tools like midjourney or Adobe Firefly.
In this video, I will show techniques for fixing noticeable edges around your pattern tiles
and for achieving higher resolution images with more varied details.
Tools like midjourney can be blamed for the rapid oversaturation
of repeat patterns on all digital creative marketplaces and stock sites.
As an example, on Adobe stock these are the results for square format illustrated repeat patterns,
and these are the results showing only the generative AI assisted assets.
The Gen AI assets take up an alarming 20% of this specific search already,
but other search keywords may lead to even higher percentages,
and this ratio is likely to increase even more in the future.
Before we get started with the tutorial, I wanted to make it clear
that I have been designing seamless or repeat patterns for commercial use for more than 15 years,
long before generative AI was available.
The techniques I am showing in this tutorial are useful for any type of patterns,
whether they are hand painted and digitized,
created from digital elements, or generated from text prompts.
I hope to encourage the ethical use of AI with this video,
helping pattern designers to realize their ideas more efficiently,
and allowing anyone new to pattern design to experiment with these.
I believe that generative AI has a place in the creative workflows
as long as it is aiding the process and not replacing it.
Let me know what you think about this in the comments,
but now it's time to get started with the tutorial.
The most important detail to include in your prompts
in case you are using midjourney, it's the --tile.
You don't even have to specify that you want a seamless pattern.
Like here you can see I just wrote hungarian folk pattern and as long as the tile attribute is in there,
it's going to generate a perfect seamless pattern for you.
Now, compared to this, for instance, in Adobe Firefly,
you can also generate some amazing pattern designs, but unfortunately, at this point
there is no way to specify that you want to create a completely seamless result.
So let me compare some of the generated images here in Photoshop.
I placed a lot of the tiles that I created into the same document
and what I'm going to do here is to go to the view menu and choose pattern preview.
This is a great way to simulate how this pattern is going to look like, and if you don't want
to see the edge of the document, you can also just pan around and look on the side.
And as you can see, this one for example, was created in mid journey, and it looks perfect.
But let's just test a few other ones.
A nice scandinavian illustration.
Then we have the hungarian folk patterns.
These look great as well.
Some aztec design.
Then we have some crazy detailed floral illustration.
Here's another one.
Then we have more of these.
And these are all midjourney.
So as you can see, no matter what I created, as long as I use the tile option,
it's always going to give us a beautiful result.
So completely seamless.
We have some more abstract results here as well.
A Memphis pattern, some lemons
again, just beautiful colors.
And it's really just up to your imagination what you include
in your prompts and how well you can describe what you want.
But compared to these, let me just quickly show you what adobe Firefly creates.
So, like I said, again, impressive results
but unfortunately, there is clear distinction between the tiles.
So let's just see a few more.
We can tell that it is trying to create repeated design, but it's just not matching perfectly.
Some of them are really far from matching, like this one is too obvious,
while another one, like this one, is almost perfect.
It has just a few little misalignments here and there, but still inconsistent results.
Again, not perfect.
Very close, but not perfect.
Luckily, midjourney can nail the seamless patterns.
And the cool thing is that you can use this, of course, for all kinds of things.
So I can create very subtle wallpaper designs, for instance,
but you can even create photorealistic textures for 3D design.
So here's some sand.
Again, let me just scroll to the side.
Then we have grass, and then we have liquid paint.
I think this was a few variations on this as well.
Some impressive results.
Now, in case you end up creating a pattern that you really like,
but for some reason, you didn't manage to get it perfectly matching up
this pattern preview in Photoshop actually can help you to fix that.
So let me just zoom a little bit closer here.
Maybe on this lemon, right, we can see that edge clearly.
And I'm going to create a new layer.
And on this new layer, I'm going to use the remove tool.
This is a fairly new tool grouped together with the other retouching tools.
Just make sure you use the sample all layers option and the remove after each stroke.
I also prefer to keep on, and since I'm using a stylus,
I'm also going to turn on the pen pressure for the size of the brush.
This way I can be a little bit more accurate.
But of course, you can do this technique with a mouse as well.
And what you would expect to be able to do is to just simply draw over around the edges here.
But unfortunately that's not the case.
As you can see the remove tool stops at the edge of the document so you won't be able
to paint over the tile preview that's above your actual canvas boundaries.
But there is an easy fix for that.
All you have to do is to extend the size of your canvas.
So let me just zoom out and go to the image menu.
Canvas size and the best thing to do is to choose percent
and type in 200 for both the width and the height.
So you are increasing the actual size to four times as big as the original image.
Now we can move our tile here to the top left and then hold down the Alt or Option key
with the move tool you can duplicate it.
Also worth holding down the Shift key just so you can align it perfectly.
Now select these two in the layers panel with the Shift key
and then again Alt or Option key and Shift key together.
Drag it down.
So now we have four tiles put together.
Now it's time to switch back to the pattern preview.
And what happens now is that we have a larger document boundary
and all four tiles are repeated now here in this preview outside of the canvas.
But the best thing is that now on that empty layer that we created earlier,
we can actually paint over all the edges in the center of the canvas.
So by using the remove tool again, I'm just going
to zoom a little bit closer and we can fix these edges beautifully.
So there is one of these edges and we can just paint over
all of this area here over the lemon.
Let's just paint over this bit here as well.
And you can see the remove tool is actually doing a brilliant job.
Let's go through there.
That line again was very noticeable.
Let's fix this line here as well and that's great.
So I'm just going to paint over this bit here.
The center point is important
of course that's going to be one of the corner points.
I'm going to remove that detail there and I'm going to paint over here.
But if you are using this technique, the most important thing not to forget
at the end is that once you fixed all the inside edges,
the outside edges would still be visible because you have four tiles put together.
So to fix this, all you have to do is to extract the center part of your canvas.
And the way we can do this is by going back to the image menu and choose canvas size.
And there go again back to percent and type in 50 and 50
so this is going to crop into the design and go back to the original size.
Photoshop is going to warn you that you are about to crop the image, but we can just proceed.
We know what we are doing.
So here is the remaining center part of our pattern
with that additional layer that we used for retouching the edges.
Now if I go to the view menu and choose pattern preview,
we will have a much better result apart from those few edges that I still haven't retouched.
But I can fix those quickly.
I can just come here and fix that detail right there.
Also this one here, I can go over it and it's still going to fix the rest of the design.
So let's just go over this very quickly,
like so I'm just going to leave the very edge of that out.
And yeah, it's pretty much completely fixed now.
So there is no visible tiling anymore.
So that's a clever little workaround that you can do.
Whether you are using ai generated images to work with
or whether you are using your own illustrations.
This is a great way to blend the edges and remove the tiling.
But a similar technique can also be used to increase the resolution and the variety of your pattern.
So once again, I'm going to go back here to the center and for now I'm just going to turn off
the pattern preview just so we can see better what is happening.
So right now I'm going to again increase the canvas
once again to 200% on both width and height.
So again we will have more space.
And this time I'm going to use this illustrative nautical pattern.
So I'm going to use the move tool and drop this up here on the top left,
then duplicate it just like before.
Quickly, two more copies, we drag them down and there is no issues here with the tiling
because this was created in midjourney.
But what I'm going to do here is to introduce some more variety
by adding some unique details in the center of the pattern.
So not around the edges, but here more in the center.
And I feel like there's too much of these boats here.
Maybe we can break it up a bit by adding, for instance, an octopus.
So what I'm going to do is to create a new layer on top of all of this
and I'm going to make a selection of one of these boats.
Let's just make a selection right here.
And then using the contextual taskbar I can click on
generative fill and let me type in octopus illustration.
Maybe we can even specify the color.
Let's make this red octopus and then hit generate.
Now this should take into consideration the existing style of the artwork that we have here.
And it created an interesting result.
It's a boat with some tentacles.
Now that happened because we still had a boat under this selection.
So what we can do is to fill in the area
under this selection with white before we use the prompt.
So I'm going to sample a color from the background
and just paint over this area here so there won't be anything there.
And then let's go back to the same generative layer and just hit generate again.
And as you can see, that helped.
So we have an octopus and another one, and this one still has a boat on it.
But I feel like this one could work quite well for what we have here.
And let's try to do this one more time on another section again
where I feel like there's too much boats together in one place.
Maybe this one here we can remove.
So let's just paint over this one and then use the lasso tool.
I'm going to make a selection, and this time in the generative fill.
I'm going to type in sea turtle illustration.
And this first result is already quite good.
The other two are less successful.
This is not bad though.
I like this first one.
The only strange thing is that it seems like it's missing a limb.
But again, that can be fixed easily.
If I draw something here and just say sea turtle flipper illustration.
Again, we got three results.
There's 1st 1, second one and third one.
I feel like this first one is probably the best.
And in case I want to make it look like it's under the shell,
I can just select the layer mask and paint over it with black.
So I'm just going to paint over here and mask out that detail to create a better result.
So now if we zoom back, we actually introduced some variety in the pattern.
And the more you do this, the more interesting the pattern will get.
But also don't forget that because we have four of the original tiles,
we also increase the resolution four times.
So the current image size is 2048 by 2048 pixels.
Now, in theory, you could continue doing this, so you could repeat again
four of these styles four times and then still add more details inside it.
Maybe some larger elements as well, some smaller elements.
But what you can also do is to put this pattern into an upscaler tool like magnific AI,
which can make your existing pattern design even more detailed.
And this is a tool, by the way, I reviewed separately
in another tutorial if you are interested to check it out.
The link is in the description below, but you can see once I have this image placed
in here on the left side, it's going to upscale this to twice as big.
So the final size is going to be above 4000 pixels square format
and there's lots of options here.
Like we can introduce the prompt, I'm just going to type in nautical pattern illustration,
maybe also include seamless pattern and we can increase the creativity.
So if we want more interesting details added, that's something we can use.
HDR is also good for adding more details, but I'm just going to keep it maybe
on one and three for now and then let's try upscaling while it's working.
Here on the top we can actually see some of my previously upscaled and enhanced images.
This right here is a collection of assets for a game design project
that we are adding to our latest Photoshop fast track course.
If you haven't seen it already, make sure to check it out.
It's an extremely fun course where you can learn
to use Photoshop by completing exciting creative projects.
And we have some more examples here of what magnific AI could do from a very
rough illustration turning into an extremely highly detailed illustration.
Once again I go through this workflow more in depth in another tutorial,
but in the meantime our upscaled and enhanced illustration is ready.
So when I go over it at this distance, you can't really tell the amount of detail
that we received, but you can already start to feel that we have more texture
and it feels more like a real watercolor drawing or illustration.
But if I download this and drop it into Photoshop,
that's where we will be able to compare it better.
So let me show you before and after.
So let's look at some of these details again.
Before and after.
Let's just scroll down around here.
Again, before and after.
Now the colors changed slightly, but the general aesthetic is the same.
And obviously it's up to you whether you prefer this version or the previous one.
But don't forget that this is even higher resolution now.
So we are talking about over 4000 pixels square format.
And last but not least, I also wanted to mention that in case you want to create
vector patterns using generative AI, you can actually use the text to vector feature
which you will find here in the properties panel.
All I did here is just created a square and then typed in
that I want bright lines and dots and I set the type to pattern.
You can see we have a few examples here,
but I can just hit generate to get some additional results.
Now, this feature is still in beta, so it's probably going to get even better,
but right now this is the only effective
generative AI tool that directly turns your text prompts into vector graphics.
So we can see some of these results that we got here.
And of course we can still switch back to the previous ones if we prefer those.
Now, each time you select one of these variations, they will be added as pattern swatches
in your swatches panel,
where you can just simply double click and then edit any of the details.
And if I press Command or Control Y, we can see all of the vector elements that were generated here,
which means that you have complete freedom to make amends and changes to your liking.