Scale Patterns to 100% Photoshop script
I love patterns. They’re the easiest and most flexible way to add texture to a layer in Photoshop. They’re always editable. They’re easy to copy between layers. They say nice things about your mum.
But they also suck. They suck, because they scale with the document, which is a very sensible thing to do, and I agree with Adobe’s choice of behaviour, but it’s often not what I want. That’s because I use patterns to add noise or subtle texture, and those textures are best served at 100% scale — other sizes tend to look blurry and unkept.
After scaling a document, I’ll often hunt down all the pattern layers and layer styles and reset them to 100% scale. Colouring layers you know you’ll need to edit later can help, because Photoshop CS6’s search can filter out everything else, making editing a bit quicker. It’s also possible to search for all overlay effects, letting you chase down layer style patterns.
That’s still time consuming and painful, because it requires manual editing. It’d be far better if there was a way to automate the entire process. I asked if it could be scripted on Twitter, and David Jensen responded by creating the script below. Awesome. Thank you, David.
Once downloaded, place Scale Patterns to 100%.jsx in your /Adobe Photoshop CS6/Presets/Scripts/ folder and restart Photoshop for the script to appear under the File menu.
Thanks also to Mike Hale, Paul MR and Jacob Rus, who helped assist David. The project is hosted on GitHub, just in case you’d like to contribute or branch it, plus there’s further discussion on PS-Scripts.
Take a bow gentlemen, you’ve earned it.
Published 23 June 2012.