Create seamlessly tiling textures

You may need seamlessly tiling textures for website backgrounds, 3D mapping and other design project. To create these tiles you will need to match the edges of your images, so that when you repeat the individual image by putting it next to itself you shouldn't be able to tell the pieces from each other.

To create such a tiling texture in PhotoShop first you need crop a nice area from your texture image. Then use the Filter/Other/Offset command and fix the visible edges with the stamp and healing brush tools. You should repeat this same procedure several times until your image is tiling perfectly and no edges are visible. At this point you can save your image as a high quality jpeg or gif image. Otherwise you can create a pattern to be used in PS by selecting Edit/Define Pattern. You can fill an area with this pattern if you select Edit/Fill and select Pattern from the Contents menu and choose the newly created custom pattern.

You can also use the shareware application TextureMagic to see the tiling edges in action. The advantage of this editor is that you can see your tile and the cloned version of it attached to it's sides in real time. This can speed up the creation of a tile tremendously.

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