Customer Reviews

Full-Color Allover Patterns CD-ROM and Book (Dover Electronic Clip Art)

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I bought about 20 of the Dover book/CD series and I'm discovering that the files on CD vary a lot in their usability.

These designs are gorgeous, a beautiful selection. The colours and designs range from rich and sumptuous to subdued depression-era like your Grandma's linoleum floors.

My beef, though, is that most of the files on this CD aren't cropped to be repeating patterns. They are usually bigger than a full repeat on the original wallpaper or whatever, so with some fiddling about in Photoshop you CAN fill a large area. If you try using most of the files as-is though, for example as a background on a website, you'll find there's overlap. You'll have to manually crop to find the repeating edges of the design - and even then, some are slightly crooked so it's a difficult task. A task that, in my opinion, should have been done already by the Publishers for a product of this type.

Other books in this same series have had a lot more care taken in producing the files, so if you're looking for easy-use designs, go for ones in the series that specify "Repeating" allover patterns. This isn't one of them.

Having said that, some of these are actually my favourite designs out of the series so far, so it still may be a worthwhile investment if you have the time to fiddle with files.

kat black =^..^= retrokat.com

The patterns on the disk are very usable. You can import these into Photoshop, resize them, create tiled images from the originals, then use them as backgrounds, patterns, masks on displacement psd files.

If you like a pattern but don't like its colors, play around with overlaying the same pattern over itself in a separate layer using different overlay effects, and use Photoshop's various adjustment layers (hue/saturation and/or color balance). You'll get what you want.

I have found this book and CD to be very valuable. Patterns range from Victorian to Indian, Islamic and Native American. I'd like to see a second edition to get even more patterns, but for the price of this item, you get a lot of value.