Photoshop Quick Tips #10: Using Pattern Overlay

Today I am going to be showing a real simple tip on Photoshop that a lot of people don't know about and it can be very useful. Creating patterns and making patterns overlay can save you a lot of work and also can look really good if you know how to use it right. To begin with we are going to need a pattern, I have a pattern that I like to use every now and then. It's the same I use on my twitter background www.twitter.com/paul0v2 you can get it here. You can use this image as a pattern or you can use any other of your choice. To transform this image into a pattern you have to open it on Photoshop, press Ctrl+A (to select everything) and go to Edit > Define Pattern and you can name it wood pattern, once you do that the pattern will be saved on your Photoshop until you delete it from there. Now that we have a good pattern we are going to move up to use the Pattern Overlay effect. Open a new document, you can do it at the size of you background in my case I used 1440x900 px with a black background and using the font Sybil Green (download it here http://www.1001fonts.com/font_details.html?font_id=1183) I wrote Abduzeedo in white. We are going to apply the Pattern Overlay on the text layer now, by clicking on Add Layer Style on your layer pallet and click on Pattern Overlay (select the wood pattern) and your result should be like this: Now that we know what the Pattern Overlay does, we are going to twist it up a bit, using the BushPack01.2 (download it here http://ariel-g.deviantart.com/art/BrushPack-01-2-47913845) I am going to ad the same Pattern Overlay and play with the brush until I get something cool like this: click on the img for a bigger view It looks good but we need a better contrast between the text and the background so what we are going to do is hold Ctrl and click on the text layer, that will give us a selection of the text. Now create a new layer and paint that text selection black and go to Select>Modify>Contract 1pixel and delete the rest. That should give you a 1px border around the text and to improve even more the contrast we can click on the text layer and go to Add Layer Style again but this time we are going to add Drop Shaddow and the final result you will get this. click on the img for a bigger view Download .psd Just to remind you guys, I didn't do the tutorial so you can get this image done, it's just so you learn how to use Pattern Overlay and adapt to your own way so you can use it more often whenever you need it. Hope that was a good Tip if you have any suggestions for the next one, feel free to leave it on the comments. Thank you,