How to Export Patterns from Photoshop for Scale (Sizes) for Spoonflower
This video shows you my process for making different scaled versions (sizes) of the pattern I created in Photoshop. The reason we do this is if someone is wanting it to be wallpaper they might want a bigger tomato. But if they are using it on a small bag or a pocket of an apron they want the tomatoes (the original repeating pattern tile) to be smaller.
I know when I am sewing the little bags I have been making, The smallest patterns I had uploaded to Spoonflower were still larger than I wanted. This past December I uploaded some smaller sizes of my favorite patterns so I can make more bags using these smaller print sizes.
Spoonflower had a 40% off fat quarters this past weekend and I bought a bunch of my new smaller sizes because a fat quarter is enough fabric for me to make a few of the little bags I am making.
Tomato Pattern available for fabric or wallpaper purchase at: https://www.spoonflower.com/en/fabric/21554274-farmer-s-market-tomatoes-on-summer-s-day-1800-l-by-dianegibbs?sku=fbty-pf-yd-f130
See whole collection: https://www.spoonflower.com/en/collections/1463964
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Episode 499, Released on Feb 24, 2026
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Transcript
diane: [00:00:00] Hey, it’s diane gibbs back with you again this week. Excited to share some more Photoshop. How-tos? So I’ve made this pattern, it is for the Spoonflower Challenge this week, and it’s Farmer’s Market. I do cut paper illustrations, so these are all. Real piece of paper. the dots I made at church yesterday, those are these little dots and I just scan them in and clean them up.
The stripes are just stripes, that I made in Photoshop. Alright, so this is my pattern preview and what I’m gonna tell you is how to export them. There are a couple different ways, but what I’ve found is that sometimes it’s too much for the computer, I guess, and it doesn’t like to do certain things. So I’ve had to kind of go about it a different way.
hopefully it all works for you. I know this way works for sure. It does take a little bit longer, but I think it’s better. So here’s my pattern. I already have it down here in a pattern tile, [00:01:00] and what we’re gonna do is we’re just gonna go to export. So file, export, export as is what we want. And I have that quick key, it’s command option.
shift and w and the first one we want to do is in this file, the big file that we made the pattern. And I work at a 12 by 12 at 600 DPI, which means that that’s a 3,600 by 3,600 pixel for spoonflower means that means it’s gonna be a 24 inch tile. So I just wanna export this. I do want my copyright and contact information, and I want to convert to SRGB.
This is all I’m gonna do with this file. I’m gonna hit export. Find where I’m gonna save it to, and I’m going to add thirty six hundred and twenty four inches because I know that that’s what I’m gonna need. Now this is gonna be a JPEG and I’m now gonna open that jpeg. I don’t need to do the rest from here, so I can actually just close this [00:02:00] window and this is what it was.
I mean, this was a different one, but let’s just open the one I just had.
Which I think I was putting them all here. And here it is the 24 inch and now this is a 5.1 megabyte. Now what you are wanting to make sure and what is not happening, and if you do that from the pattern preview from the big, huge Photoshop file, it’s not repeating some of these things left right up and down.
It’s just missing when you do it for a different scale. So this way, if I open this file that’s five megabytes, it’s really not that big of a deal. So let’s do that again. Command shift option W or file export As. And now we’re gonna choose 50% of that. Now, whatever you wanna do, you can type 1800 or you can type 50%.
Sometimes these things continue to go backwards. That’s okay. I just need to make sure all my things are still repeat. They are. I’m gonna hit export. When the [00:03:00] name comes up, I just hit the right arrow key and I just now can delete 36 and go to 18. And instead of 24, it’s 12 and save. And then I do this for all the sizes that I’m gonna do.
I’m actually gonna do it all for you right now so you can a idea. Now, what this means is that the pa, the repeat, if you were buying a yard of fabric. The repeat is, there’re gonna be more of those tomatoes on that yard of fabric, so I know that it’s gonna be 1350. I know that 1350 is 37.5%. My pixels have to be an even number.
Okay, has to be now copyright and contact is fine. So hit export. I hit the right arrow Key. Gets me back to this. I know this is gonna be 1350 and instead of 24 inches, it is going to now be nine inches. [00:04:00] So it’s like a medium again in that tile. The tile, it would be nine inches, so yard is 36 inches. So when you’re buying fabric or you’re buying, wallpaper, do you want your tomatoes bigger or do you want more of the tomatoes?
You know, if I was making a tie or a little bag, I wouldn’t want a really big nine inches. It’s too big. I need a lot smaller. So it’s kind of like, how are you gonna use this then that helps you to know how you’re gonna buy it. I’ve found that I tend to. and not make things small enough, for me, for the way I use them.
All right? So I’m not saving over this, right? This, this file I’m, exporting. So it’s exporting off of this, so I’m not actually changing this file. Now this one is gonna be six inches. It’s gonna be 900 pixels, so it’s at 25% of that 3,600. Again, everything here is good. [00:05:00] It’s just about making the size now.
So instead of 36 and 24, it is 906 inches. And I have a cheat sheet right in front of me that reminds me of what I’m doing. Now, I could stop at three inches. I could stop at six inches. It really depends on what you want. I want people to be able, if they’re making bags and it’s only three inches tall, that they have enough that they would have a whole tile.
Well, I don’t have that yet. I wouldn’t have this whole thing. In a three inch tile right yet. So again, let’s export again quick key commands or file export as. And this time it’s a little different. Now it has to be a round number. So I know that I want 450 pixels. Well, 450 pixels. Sometimes I look this is you type in four 50 and sometimes it works.[00:06:00]
If you do 12.44, that is actually four 50. I don’t know. You gotta be okay with two pixels or just write that down. Now I’m gonna export it. Now I have something that will be a three inch tile. I hit my right arrow key, so it gets me all the way to the end. Then I can easily just delete this is four 50 and three inches and I save now.
This is where I may be pushing it too far, but I am going to do this mainly for me because I want, what if this whole tile is in a one inch? That would be great for a ditzy. Absolutely. Great. It might be a little much for a ditzy, but I’d like to see, I’d like someone if they wanted this, that they could have it that small, or maybe it’s for a dollhouse.
Well. They need it smaller. A one inch, you know, a little room in a dollhouse is much smaller, [00:07:00] so I’m giving them those different sizes now because I’ve worked in Photoshop. I’m working at 600 DPII scan at 600 DPI. I did scale down a good bit, my tomatoes from the original sizes, but it’s up to you, you know here again, 200 and 24 is about an inch, so 6.22.
We can’t have 2, 2 5. So this is where, 6.25 gives me 2, 2, 4. So that’s the only thing you really need to watch. It can’t be an e, an odd number or it won’t work on Spoonflower. So I’m gonna hit export just like always. This is a, this would be a little small for a ditzy. I think actually there’s too much probably going on, but I just wanted to show you, depends on what your pattern is.
So 2, [00:08:00] 2, 4, and oops, didn’t mean to hit tab. 2, 2, 4 inches. No. And this is a one inch. Did I write it was three inches? Yeah. Okay. Alright, great. The last one was three inches. Sometimes I, for some reason write four inches, but it’s not. All right, so now the only other thing that I do is I have a file that I can use on my website that shows it repeating.
This is just the tie. I have a five inch by five inch at 300 DPI for a swatch sample sheet. So I have a, I’ve created these swatches and I have a swatch sample sh blah swatch sample sheet that is a tongue twister. Anyway, that. Is from that I have made in InDesign and then I upload that as A PDF so that if somebody was interested in licensing it, they could get in touch with me and it has my info and it on mockups and things like that.
So [00:09:00] here’s what I’ve done. I have a background that is just white. I have layer one, which is a color. it’s just a song. It doesn’t matter. You’re gonna be filling over it. And then from this, I went down to. I think it was effects. Is that what it did? Yeah. Pattern overlay. Not, and so that then this layer pops up.
Maybe I can show you. Let’s see. Alright, so I go to fx. It’s really effects, right? And you go to pattern overlay and it’s just picking whatever pattern you have up, right? And I actually don’t want it angled. I just want it the way I designed it. This is the scale. If I was doing it at a scale, this is the scale I’ve designed it at.
Obviously this isn’t the right one. and I don’t want multiply. I want normal because I want it to be what I am doing. So all my patterns are here in my pattern and I’ve [00:10:00] organized them since this is a fruit and veggie. this is the one it is. Obviously this is five inches at the 3,600. Well, that’s too big.
No problem. We just hit, Here, not in opacity. You could angle it. I don’t recommend that. ’cause then it’s not as, but I go down a lot now, make, this is too far. Right. let’s scoot this, thing up. I want the repeat to happen and I can move it, you know, around, but I can’t really see the repeat yet, even at 30 seconds.
So let’s go to 30. And I’m seeing the repeat happen. So I vertically and horizontally you can see. So I’m good with this. Now, I don’t like that this stripe is kind of weirdly, so I’m gonna just move it so that the edges are a little bit, and I can make it a little smaller, a little bigger, whatever. [00:11:00] But I’m good.
I like this. This gives me, and I, you know, you may just wanna tweak some things so that it’s. Utilizing your space better. I don’t know. Whatever you want, right? You may want it a little bigger, but I like my pattern to, for people to be able to see it, but also I want them, I kind of want it to be a little bigger, but I do wanna see the repeat and I’m not, well, I’m seeing it here, but I’m not seeing, so, all right, so then I’m gonna hit okay.
And now I have this five by five saved thing, so I’m going to go, I don’t wanna save. I mean, I’m gonna save over this template thing, but I have this kind of in my main thing. But what I would wanna do is command shift s, which is save as. Now I would want to put this in my patterns, my pattern collections.
I’m organizing things and this is the, you know, blue on, [00:12:00] like say, I’d already done this one, but I, this is gonna be the light blue. and I know I’ve already done this one, but I’m gonna just do this one 30. I don’t know if I 2%, so I’m just gonna say percent per 30. Well, I won’t know what that means. 30%. now I have this and I want to save this as a, a jpeg again, I can always come back to it, but now I have a, a five by five that’s showing that, so it flattens it, but then this file is still here.
I can save this file now. But it’s really important to have this kind of five by five thing so that I can put these on other things. Now, you noticed before maybe I had masked, it, that must’ve been what I had done before. It doesn’t matter. This works. Now when I come back into this file, I just have to, double click on the pattern overlay and then pick another [00:13:00] pattern.
That’s it. That’s all I have to do. Now I can change the sizes and the angles and all that stuff, but it does keep what I had done before. So that’s how you make the little thing that you have the other things in. All right. I hope that was helpful and it’s good to see you two weeks in a row. I hope you have a great day and let me know what you think, and if you have any questions about anything, that would be awesome.
Hope you have a great day.
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