Download Blue version:
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1280x1024px
1600x1200px
1280x800px (widescreen)
1920x1200px (widescreen)

Download Black version:
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1280x1024px
1600x1200px
1280x800px (widescreen)
1920x1200px (widescreen)

Download the template

I’ve always loved these simple pattern wallpapers. They’re the only type I can stand for very long, other than a plain, solid colour.

So, I made this little template for you to make your own. Click the icon above to get a ZIP file containing the Photoshop PSD.

The PSD will open very small. This is to keep the file size down. It’s annoying on sites like deviantart when people make a wallpaper, then have it in a thousand variations of colour and every possible resolution in one ZIP file, making the download 50mb or something ridiculous.

So with this template, you can resize the image yourself to what ever size you like. It’s built with adjustment layers, so it won’t pixelate or blur. You can choose your own pattern or change the colour very easily.

The only down-side is that you need Photoshop to be able to do all this… so if you don’t have Photoshop and want it at a different size, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

Pattern resources

Original pattern from 5qm.de, where you can find more patterns.

The Inspiration Gallery has some great old style patterns.

Deviantart also has a good Photoshop Pattern Resources section where you can download patterns already as Photoshop Pattern files.

A slight change of pace for me – a GIMP tutorial. I don’t use GIMP a lot but I’ve found a lot of my experience with Photoshop is transferable. This is one such case. In Photoshop I would have gone to Select > Color Range then used the selection as a layer mask.

In GIMP the process is similar. You just have to know where to look. Turns out it’s in Color > Color to Alpha. There you can choose a colour or use the eye dropper to sample from the image and that colour will be turned transparent.

This was all inspired by this work by the very talented Tordo on deviantART:

I was struck by the patterned sky and wanted to try it out on a photo. Since I was using Ubuntu at the time, I thought i’d see what GIMP could manage. Turns out, as described above, it managed rather well.

So today I decided to document the process in GIMP with a video tutorial. My first time recording a tutorial in Ubuntu, too – it went very smoothly. I might have to do more for GIMP in future.

Update

I’ve remade the tutorial with Photoshop. Same images and everything, just how you’d go about doing the same thing in Photoshop.