Expert: Scott Valentine - 2/12/2008

Question
QUESTION: Hi Scott,

I am a Photoshop Elements 2 user, with basic knowledge of the software. I am trying to do something I have not done before and am wondering if I can accomplish my task with this software. Here is what I am trying to do:



I have make some simple line drawings of children's clothing on paper and will scan these drawings into my computer. I will also scan swatches of fabric into my computer. Using Photoshop, can I somehow use the scan of the fabric as a fill that I can then use to fill the drawings with? If so, what file format should I use when savings my scanned images? I might also be able to accomplish this using Adobe Illustrator, but I thought I would try Photoshop first.



Thanks for your time and any help you can give to me.



Sincerely,

Nancy Lubrano


ANSWER: Hi Nancy - sounds like you have an interesting project ahead of you!

I believe Elements will allow you to make fine enough selections to fill your images. You will need to become familiar with any selection tools Elements has to offer, preferring vector if available (I don't use Elements, so I am not sure of the tool set).

You should be able to save to any current image format from your scanner, but JPG or TIFF would be preferred. JPG will be smaller, but you may need to adjust the quality settings for your scanner. Elements might be able to acquire the images directly from you scanner software, which will save you some time.

If you have Illustrator available, I would highly recommend doing your work there. You can easily convert your line drawings to vector, which will allow you to scale your work. You can also apply raster images to layers (i.e., bitmaps such as TIFF or JPG), so it would be a more flexible work flow. You may still need to use Elements for some color correction or other image editing, though.

I hope this helps. If you have further questions, please feel free to ask!

-Scott

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Scott,

I brought my line drawings into Illustrator and converted them so I could fill them using live paint. I took digital images of my fabric swatches and I place them into my Illustrator file and add them to my swatchs. When I select the swatch to fill a portion of my drawing, the fabric image is tiling within the drawing. Any way to avoid this? Does my fabric image have to be certain dimensions? I think the probelm is the repeat pattern and how the fabric image is cropped. I may just have to keep playing with it, but I thought I would ask to see if you had any suggestions.

Thank you for all your help so far!

Nancy

Answer
Hi Nancy - sorry for the delay... questions are not showing up in my email lately.

I had forgotten to mention the tiling issue, so I'm glad you brought it up. The only way to get rid of this is to create a seamless pattern, which typically takes Photoshop. Again, I'm not sure if Elements can do what you need, but it's worth a shot.

You will need to use a Healing or Cloning tool, and start with a square image to make things easy. The idea is to offset your pattern by 50% top and sideways, meaning you take the upper left corner and make it the center point of the document. In Photoshop, there is an offset command; if Elements doesn't have this feature, you will have to make careful selections of each of the four squares and move them accordingly so that the upper left square moves to the lower right, the lower left moves to the upper right, upper right to lower left, and finally lower right to upper left.

Whew!

Now you have a seam in the center. You would use healing or cloning to cover up these seams, and then reverse the placement (or if you are confident you got the squares perfect, you can leave things as they are and go from there).

I do recommend searching for tutorials on making seamless patterns in Elements, which should be able to provide examples and pictures to help you see what's going on.

I hope this helps! If you need more help, please ask =)

-Scott