Making Patterned Beads in Photoshop (CS2 or Elements)

This tutorial is based on Pat's Patterned Beads tutorial written for PSP users.

I followed Pat's lead, and beads here were done with pattern, colour, gradients and sometimes combinations of those (if you look closely, you'll see color over pattern, color over gradient, pattern over color (no, not the same thing!)

You will need to create a ball thingy (overlay, underlay, andale!). This 3d Ball Tutorial was pretty simple and doable even for us non-artist types. It works in PS Elements (at least in Elements 4)--you won't have a flow option, so make sure the airbrush is active and play around with the opacity. I set mine for 34% for the shadow and 10% for the highlight.

When you're done making your ball, KEEP THE BALL SELECTED, delete (or make invisible) the black background layer, and merge the rest--ball and 2 shadow/highlight layers. Now, filter/distort/spherize. Remember, keep the ball selected. It's the perfect size for your bead template!

As mentioned above, you can use colours, gradients or patterns. You do not need to have the patterns already set in PS--they can be loaded from connected drives on the fly.

With your 3d ball still selected, create a new layer, select it, then edit/fill with colour #c0c0c0.

Keep in mind that the size you see here, when zoomed out to 20%, is about the size it would be when printed.


This will be your bead Template



in PS (or e-mail or web) at 100%



Approximate printed size

As we make each bead we're gonna move it off to another container; we'll place all of our beads in the same .png container, but spaced far enough apart so that each bead will be easy to select, copy, and use. Create a new document with dimensions 1800 pixels x 1800 pixels, 300dpi, transparent background. Zoom out to about 20% and move to the side so that you can see it, but it is not obstructing your primary workspace.

Select your bead layer, TURN OFF VISIBILITY, then ^J (ctrl j) the layer (duplicate it) as many times as you want to. Leave the circle SELECTED throughout the tutorial. If you lose the selection, use the magic wand and click on any transparent area on a selected visible layer, then select/inverse to recapture the circle.

The "beads" are now all on separate layers.

Turn off visibility in the 3d ball layer, then make as many duplicates of it (just as you did, above) as you made for the bead layer.

Move one set of bead and 3d ball to the BOTTOM of your layer palette and name them, respectively, “bead template” and “3dball template” (or whatever you want, really!). If you forgot to do this earlier, turn the visibility off on these layers.

This might be a good time to save your new “Beadmaker”. Save it .psd so that your layers remain separate.

Make sure your first bead's visibility is ON, and make sure the circle is selected. Did I say that already?

Move one of the 3d ball layers directly under your first bead in the layer palette, and make sure its visibility is on.

Select the bead layer.

Select/Modify/Expand by 2 pixels

Edit/Fill the selected bead with color or pattern, or use the gradient tool to apply a gradient to the bead.

Filter/Distort/Spherize at default (mine was 100%, but 50% looked good--different but good--too! Just make sure the circle remains, oh nevermind!)

On your layers palette, next to “opacity” you see The “blend mode” dropdown menu most likely with “normal” in the window. Still on the bead layer, choose blend modes from the dropdown menu until you get a look you like. Go ahead, experiment a little!

Play around with filters (any that you have-very fun effects on some) and textures, then filter/distort/spherize again (if you want!). This “spherize” filter's effect is most clearly seen when you use a pattern or gradient.

When it looks the way you want it to look, make sure that both layers are rasterized/simplified, double-check to make sure things are still as you want them, then merge just these two layers by clicking the bead layer and Layer/merge down.

Voila. Seed Bead #1.

Switch to your move tool. Grab the STILL SELECTED (!) bead and drag it to the new document, and save the file. “beaddrawer1.png” might be a good name.

Repeat until you have a bunch! Line them up, from the top, pretty! When that drawer is half full, merge all visible layers. Duplicate the layer (^j), then move the duplicate set of beads to the lower half of the drawer. You should be able to see the free transform handles all around the set at the bottom: hold down the shift key and pull down on the top center free transform handle. This will uniformly squish all the beads in the duplicate set at once.

Now, like Pat said (paraphrase of course): go use em!

Hey, thanks for trying this out. Hope it was helpful. and let me know where you run into kinks!

LLG aka denise