Learning Photoshop Tutorials: - Making Rounded Corners - Making a Seemless Texture - Making Cool Wallpapers Other Program Tutorials: Learning Zbrush Tutorials

Seemless Textures in Photoshop
From Free Photoshop CS3 Tutorials by Neticule

Introduction to Seemless Textures
Using a seemless texture is one of the most popular, and easiest way to create a nice scalable background for use on anything, all it requires is the use of the offset filter and a few different tools, like smudge and/or clone. So open up your copy of Photoshop and lets get learnin!

Before removing seems     :)

After removing seems     :)

Step 1: Create a new document or open an existing texture First we need to create a new document, open Photoshop and press CTRL+N to open the new document menu. Make sure the size is large enough to work with, if your unsure its always good to go with a large canvas, you can always scale it down, which actually makes things look alot smoother. For this tutorial we will use a 400x400 pixel canvas with a white background.

Creating a new document

Step 2: Create your texture (skip this if step if you have a pre made texture) The nice thing about textures is you can really do whatever you want at this point, play around with the brushes, the filters, until you come up with something cool. You can follow along with the way I do it if you want, but for this step you really should just play around and explore photoshops filters and brushes yourself. Creating my texture: First, I set my foreground and background colors to a nice dark blue, and a nice light blue. Then create a new layer with CTRL+SHIFT+N. Then we will use the Cloud Filter: Filter > Render > Clouds. This is a good base for a cool texture. Then apply the Watercolor Filter: Filter> Artistic > Watercolor. And Finally apply the Accented Edges Filter: Filter > Brush Strokes > Accented Edges. I personally just used the default settings on all of these, but play around to get some really neat things goin on. Step 2b. Use clouds as a base Step 2c. Convert it to watercolor Step 2d. Add accented edges

Step 2a. Pick your colors

Step 3: Offset your texture Now that you have your texture made (or have opened a pre-existing one) its time to remove the seems, but first we have to SEE the seems. So to do this we will simply offset the whole image. To accomplish this, goto Filter > Other > Offset... It doesnt not really matter how much you offset it, just make sure to leave enough room on the side of the seem to work with, I suggest offsetting halfway, so for a 400x400 canvas we will offset it 200 pixels right and 200 pixels down. After using the Offset filter you will be able to see the seem in your texture, this is what we need to remove, or blend, so go on to step 4 to start on it!

Step 3a. Filter > Other > Offset...

Step 4: Remove the seems There is no instant way to remove seems from a texture (as far as I know!), so we will accomplish this with the help of some of photoshops great brushes and tools. I am most fond of the smudge tool for this step, but other tools may be required if you have fine lines you need to keep intact. The clone tool is also very useful, by cloning each side of the seem and blending them into eachother you can get rid of most seems. Be aware that some textures are much more difficult then others to work with, you will have to just use your artistic side when fixing them. For my texture I will start off by using the smudge tool. You can find it in the main tool pallette that is on the left side of your screen, you may need to hold the mouse down on the icon to see the other tools. Now we begin the slow process of smudgine out all of the edges, choose a good brush size, I am using 19 pixels for now, with a strength of 47% on the smudge. Just play around with this, you will have to change it around alot for the best results, at some points you may want to smudge with 100% strength, other times you may just need a little bit. After you have your brush setup, its as simple as starting on one side of a seem, and smudging towards it, the do the other side, repeat this process (using varying strengths of smudge) until your seems are gone. If you find that using the Smudge tool does not work for your texture, try out the Clone Stamp. Again you will have to fiddle with the brush settings to get everything good, I suggest starting at about 10-20 pixels and using a strength of 50%. Now you will need to fill in the seems using the parts of the texture right next to the seem. Hold down the ALT key and click an area about 20-30 pixels to the side of a seem, this will define that area as the one being cloned. Now simple work the brush around the seem, you will most likely need to re define areas to clone, I suggest working on one side of the seem, and then doing the other side to mix them together, but again it all depends on the structure of your texture and what you can get away with. Using Smudge and/or Clone should work pretty good for most textures, you should always play around with the other tools available as well, I used a small bit of the Dodge and Burn brushes in this texture to even out the spots where smudge made it too blurry, and topped it off with the sharpen brush on a very low setting as well.

This is the result of offsetting our texture. Seems were removed using the smudge brush, and sharpened up using the sharpen brush, and the dodge and burn brushes.

Step 5: Tile it somewhere! The whole point of having a seemless texture, is so that you can have it tiled without looking like poo. If you want to test out your new texture, its easy in photoshop. With your seemless texture that you just created open, goto Edit > Define Pattern, and give it a name. Now create a new document with CTRL+N, this time make the canvas really big so we can see how the texture tiled, I went with 2000x2000 pixels :) Now with your giant canvas open, simply goto Edit > Fill, choose pattern fromt he dropdown, and select the pattern you just defined. Click OK and your canvas will be filled with the texture! Doing it like this is a quick way to see how well it looks, and you will be able to go back and make any changes

Final Thoughts:
I hope your now able to make a seemless texture! I know my example isnt amazing, but hopefully it showed you everything you need to know about making a seemless texture in Photoshop.