


Making a seamless tile

The first is to take what you've learned by removing the scratches to make a seamless tiling texture. There are filters that do a decent job of doing this for you, but that's not going to teach you much about how to retouch photos. To start, hit and find yourself an image that's close to a pattern, like a rug swatch or a flat shot of wood. My image:

Click to download (be you too lazy to find your own)

Open it in your editor and then we're going to use a trick I learned while making a map for Quake 3. In Photoshop, select Filter/Other/Offset… and offset your pixels to the side about 50% of your image width— it doesn't really matter, you just need to see the seam and be able to remove it without hitting the left or right side (don't worry about offsetting the top and bottom, we'll get to that after). If someone knows how to do this in The GIMP, please let me know. I couldn't see a similar filter.

So here is something like what you should have:

Now we'll get to removing the line and the sheen at the left so that the texture can tile horizontally.

Click for animation

If you were using this for a game map or something where it would be tiling a lot, you'd also want to remove any obvious repeating elements like a single knot in the wood. Once you're confident you have removed the seam, offset filter the texture vertically and remove that seam. If you're content to simply remove the seam, then you can move on, but if you want a truly seamless tile, then test your image by selecting all (Edit/Select All) and creating a pattern in Edit/Define Pattern. Make a new document that's much larger than your single texture tile and then fill it with your pattern (command/control delete for Photoshop users).

Almost there but there is a little bit of visible repeating sheen left to clean up

You don't have to get it perfectly seamless if you don't want, but it's a good exercise for learning how to clone with a specific goal in mind. Now with your new cloning powers, we'll move onto the more strictly photographic retouching.

Expand full story

You must to comment.