Thursday, June 24, 2010

Adobe Photoshop - Create Funky Backgrounds

www.elijournals.com

Background patterns have many uses including sprucing up your collages and other Photoshop designs. But you don't always have to rely on stock art; you can create your own funky background design with the help of Photoshop's Polar Coordinates filter.
To create a funky background in Photoshop:


1 Create a new Photoshop document.


2 Your pattern will have two colors. Fill the canvas with the first color of your choice, and then set the foreground color to the second color of your choice. We filled our canvas with a bright green and set the foreground color to a darker green.


3 Choose the Gradient tool from the Tools panel and select the Linear Gradient button on the tool Options bar.


4 Select the Transparent Stripes preset gradient and click and drag on your document window to fill it with the gradient. The direction you click and drag is up to you. You can see our example in Figure A.


Figure A:
Figure A


5 Choose Filter > Distort > Polar Coordinates to open the Polar Coordinates dialog box.


6 Select the Polar To Rectangular option button and click OK.


7 Reapply the filter one to three times by pressing [command]F ([Ctrl]F in Windows). We reapplied the filter just once for results shown in Figure B.


Figure B:
Figure B