From Flat Print to Seamless Pattern: A Compositing Artist's Walkthrough of Photoshop's Pattern Preview

There’s a specific kind of project that shows up constantly in commercial compositing work: you need a surface to be something it isn’t. A wall needs a different wallpaper. A product needs a custom textile behind it. A portrait needs an environment that doesn’t exist yet. For years, my solution was to hunt down stock textures or hand-paint something from scratch, which could eat half a day before I’d even opened the actual comp.