Tutorial: Creating Seamless Textures

If you want to create a seamless texture, you first need a eligible photo. As we want to tile it, it may not have any too eye-catching features on there. Small ones however can be fixed. The most important thing is that the lightning must be even - in many photos, the top is slightly more light than the bottom. Even a small difference in lightning will be striking in a seamless texture. Textures with repeating regular patterns like bricks need to be rotated upright first before being processed further.

We will start with this rock texture. Seamless textures are cut into a square of powers of two. So e.g. 1024x1024 or 512x512. We will not use the crop tool to cut out the texture but the selection tool, making the selection into a layer. In GIMP it's Shift+Ctrl+L and then Shift+Ctrl+N.

Filter -> Map -> Small tiles