Create from Image in Photoshop: Turn Any Photo Into Patterns & Vectors

Turn Any Photo Into Patterns, Vectors, and Color Palettes

Adobe used to keep this magic trick on your phone. The Adobe Capture app could take a photo and spit out repeating patterns, vector shapes and color themes automatically — genuinely useful, but stranded on a completely different device from the one you actually design on.

Photoshop 2020 folded all of that functionality straight into the Libraries panel, and then went further. One command, Create from Image, turns any open photo into seamless patterns, scalable vector shapes, extracted color themes and custom gradients — all saved into your Creative Cloud Libraries and synced to every device you sign in on.

In this tutorial we’ll tour every mode of the tool, then put the assets straight to work building a piece of packaging artwork from scratch. If you haven’t updated Photoshop yet, do that first — this one is worth the download.

What Create from Image Actually Does

Point it at a photograph and Photoshop analyzes the image’s shapes, edges and colors, then offers you four different kinds of design asset generated from it:

• Patterns — seamless, tiling repeats built from the photo’s forms, with live scale and rotation control.
• Shapes — true vector artwork traced from the image, scalable to any size without softening.
• Color themes — a palette pulled from the photo’s dominant colors, with each swatch adjustable.
• Gradients — multi-stop gradients sampled from the image, with movable start, mid and end points.

Everything lands in your Creative Cloud Libraries rather than as a flattened layer, which is the part that makes it useful rather than just fun. A saved pattern can be dropped into any document as a live Pattern Fill layer, and a saved shape stays a vector forever.

Opening the Libraries Panel

Libraries is where Photoshop keeps the assets you reach for most often — colors, brushes, graphics, character styles — and it’s where Create from Image lives.

1. Open the photo you want to work from

   Any image will do, but photos with clear, well-defined subjects and strong color separation give the tool the most to work with. The example here is a single pineapple on a plain background.

2. Go to Window › Libraries

   The Libraries panel opens on the right side of your workspace. If you’ve used it before, your existing libraries and assets are already sitting there.

3. Click the plus icon and choose Create from Image

   A new dialog opens showing your photo alongside a live preview of whatever asset it’s about to generate. Drag the corner to make the window larger — you’ll want the room.

If you used the phone app in its heyday and want to see how the two compare, we have a walkthrough of creating patterns in Adobe Capture as well.

Building a Pattern from Your Photo

Patterns is the first tab across the top of the dialog, and it’s the one you’ll probably spend the most time in. Photoshop generates a tiling repeat automatically, then hands you the controls to shape it.

1. Select the Patterns tab

   The preview immediately fills with a seamless repeat built from your photo. It’s already tiling correctly — there are no edges to fix by hand.

2. Adjust the scale

   Scale controls how large each element of the source image appears in the repeat. Pull it down for a dense, textural look; push it up and individual subjects read clearly as graphic elements.

3. Rotate the repeat

   Rotation turns the source area, which changes the whole pattern. Rotate it around until you like the repeat; aim for something nice, simple and fun.

4. Try the other repeat types

   The row of pattern type icons at the top switches between different kinds of repeat, and some of them get a little more trippy. Aaron clicks through them, goes back to the first one, then brings Rotation and Scale down a little for a really simple pattern that will sit behind other things.

5. Save to CC Libraries

   Click Save to CC Libraries. The pattern is added to your active library and syncs to every device signed into your Creative Cloud account.

Generating Vector Shapes

The Shapes tab is the simplest screen in the whole dialog — a single slider — and arguably the most valuable output, because what comes out the other side is real vector artwork.

1. Switch to the Shapes tab

   Photoshop traces your image into a flat silhouette. The preview updates instantly.

2. Set Detail and turn on Smooth On Save

   The tab has one slider, Detail, and two switches, Invert and Smooth On Save. Aaron turns on Smooth On Save, then saves.

3. Save it to your library

   Because the result is a vector, you can scale it to any size later without losing a pixel of resolution. That is the difference between a shape you can use on a business card and on a billboard.

Once a shape is in your library, it comes into a document as a smart object (Capture Shape 1 in the video) that you can scale larger or smaller without losing resolution. To draw and edit vector shapes of your own, see our guide to using the Custom Shape Tool.

Pulling Color Themes and Gradients

The last two tabs are about color rather than form, and both take seconds.

Color themes

Switch to Color Themes and Photoshop samples a palette straight from the photograph. Drag any swatch’s sample point to a different part of the image to swap that color out. It’s the fastest way to build a palette that’s guaranteed to sit comfortably against the imagery you’re designing around, because it literally came from it.

Gradients

The Gradients tab lets you set a start point, a midpoint and an end point on the image, and builds a gradient from the colors underneath them. Move the points around to change the ramp — from a green through to a bright orange, then pull the end point somewhere darker for a deeper finish. The Gradient Stops slider changes how many stops there are. Aaron sets it to a two-stop gradient, so it goes from one color straight to the other, and saves that to the library alongside everything else.

You can also load additional images into the dialog and mix assets across more than one photo, which is worth exploring once the basics feel familiar.

Designing a Packaging Graphic with Your New Assets

Generating assets is the easy half. Here’s how they come together into an actual finished piece — in this case the front of a package for a fictional brand of pineapples.

1. Create a new document

   File › New, set to 2500 x 3000 pixels. A portrait format suits packaging; adjust to whatever your real output needs.

2. Drag your pattern in from Libraries

   Click and drag the saved pattern from the Libraries panel onto your canvas. It arrives as a live Pattern Fill layer at full resolution, filling the whole document.

3. Dial in the pattern scale

   Double-click the Pattern Fill layer’s thumbnail to reopen its options. Lower the scale to tighten the repeat, or raise it to let individual elements breathe. You can also click and drag directly on the canvas to reposition the pattern inside the fill.

4. Draw a solid background panel

   Grab the Rectangle Tool and draw a panel over the pattern. Set its fill by eyedropping a dark green from the pineapple leaves in the pattern on your canvas, and set the stroke to none. This is the surface the rest of the design sits on.

5. Duplicate the panel for a border

   Drag the rectangle layer onto the new layer icon. On the copy, remove the fill entirely, add a stroke sampled from the image, then press Ctrl or Cmd + T and hold Shift + Alt or Option to scale it down evenly from the center. Raise the stroke width until the inset border reads clearly, then press Ctrl or Cmd + T on both rectangles together and make them a little larger.

6. Bring in your vector shape

   Drag the saved shape in from Libraries and confirm the placement dialog. Press Ctrl or Cmd + I to invert it if you need it light against a dark panel.

7. Add your type

   Press T for the Type Tool and set your text on two separate layers — one word each works well when you want to control their weights independently.

8. Align everything to the panel

   Ctrl or Cmd + click the background rectangle’s thumbnail to load it as a selection, then use the Move Tool (V) and the align buttons to center each element vertically and horizontally inside it. Do this for the border, the shape and both text layers.

9. Refine the type

   Set the two words to different font weights — a Light for one and something heavier for the other — and sample their color from the background so the whole thing stays inside one palette. Scale them to sit comfortably against the shape.

10. Enlarge the pineapple

    Bring the words together, then transform the pineapple and hold Alt or Option so it grows from its center. Press Enter. It stays sharp because it is a vector.

The Crop Trick That Makes Pattern Fills Worth It

This is the part that justifies keeping the background as a live Pattern Fill layer rather than flattening it into pixels.

Press C for the Crop Tool and drag the crop boundary outward, past the edges of your document. Commit the crop, and the pattern in the background automatically generates into the new space. Extend it sideways, extend it down — the fill keeps producing more pattern to cover whatever area you’ve just created.

For anything with an uncertain final size — packaging that might need a bleed, wrapping paper, a background that has to work in both portrait and landscape — that behavior removes an entire category of rework. A flattened background would have needed cloning or a fresh render; a Pattern Fill layer just fills.

To finish, double-click the Pattern Fill layer and refine the Scale for the new canvas. Then group everything above the pattern, make the group a little larger, press Ctrl or Cmd + A to select the whole canvas, and center the group vertically and horizontally. Press F for full screen to see the finished graphic.

Where People Get Tripped Up

Pushing the scale too far in the dialog

It’s tempting to set the pattern exactly how you want it before saving. Don’t over-invest — the scale and rotation are fully editable later on the Pattern Fill layer, and judging the right scale is much easier at real document size than in a small preview window.

Rasterizing the Pattern Fill layer

The moment you rasterize, you lose both the live scale control and the crop auto-fill behavior above. Leave it as a fill layer for as long as you possibly can.

Forgetting the shapes are vectors

People often place a generated shape, scale it down to fit, and then treat it as fixed. It comes in as a smart object, so you can scale it back up whenever you like without losing resolution. Rasterizing it out of habit throws away the main reason to use the Shapes tab at all.

Starting from a cluttered photograph

Busy backgrounds produce muddy patterns and unreadable shape traces. A clear subject against a simple background gives the tool the contrast it needs, and takes about ten seconds to shoot or find.

Ignoring the color themes

The palette tab gets skipped because it seems like the least impressive output. It’s actually the one that does the most quiet work — sampling your type and panel colors from it is what makes a design built this fast look deliberate rather than assembled.

Make It Your Own

What makes Create from Image worth building into your workflow isn’t that it produces good-looking assets — it’s that it produces your assets, from your photographs, in a fraction of the time it would take to draw them. The pineapple packaging above went from a single JPEG to a finished graphic in a matter of minutes, and nothing in it came from a stock library.

Shoot something with a clean silhouette, run it through all four tabs, and see what you get back. Custom wrapping paper, textile prints, album artwork, social templates — the source photo is the only thing standing between you and a design system nobody else has.

Quick Reference: Keys, Menus and Settings

• Open the toolWindow > Libraries, plus sign > Create from Image
• Make the assetsPatterns: Scale, Rotation; Shapes: Detail, Smooth On Save; Gradient Stops: 2; Save to CC Libraries
• Pattern backgroundNew 2500 x 3000 px document, drag the pattern in, double-click Pattern Fill for Scale
• Inset borderCmd/Ctrl + T, hold Shift + Alt/Option to shrink from the center
• Shape and typeDrag Capture Shape 1 in, Cmd/Ctrl + I inverts it; T for the Type Tool
• Center it allCmd/Ctrl-click the rectangle thumbnail, V, align buttons; Cmd/Ctrl + A for the whole canvas
• More backgroundC, drag the crop outward, click the checkmark; F for full screen