Photoshop reduces patterns to 1x1 pixel

[Simon Henke]

I recently noticed, that when you define a pattern from an area whose pixels are all the same color (for example a rectangle shape), the resulting pattern will be 1x1 instead of the actual size.

Is this by design? I assume this was implemented to reduce the filesize for the stored pixels, but this behavior is actually causing a problem in one of my plugins.

Said plugin is using DecoScripts to fill up the canvas with the pattern in a specific way, but the results are completely wrong of course as the pattern is 1x1px instead of for example 400x300px.

Is there any way to turn of this "compression"?

[r-bin]

And the option with one slightly modified pixel is not suitable?

You can try to create a 16-bit pattern, with a minimal pixel difference, so that 8-bit doesn't show any difference at all.

A more complex option is to edit the .pat file. But there is a "dark forest" : )

[Simon Henke]

Thanks for the reply.

I also thought about the fix with the one changed pixel, but I felt like it's quite an ugly hack. However, the 16-bit/8-bit conversion trick you've mentioned might be an option.

At this point I'm only questioning if it's even worth implementing the fix.. maybe nobody will even use the function on a plain, mono-colored rectangle at all. Messing around with the .pat file sounds even more complex, so I'll discard this idea for now 😃