Photoshop: How to create a seamless texture

Seamless textures can be very useful for use in website backgrounds or to create a texture for photo-manipulations or digital paintings. Here is a quick photoshop tutorial to step you through the process of creating a seamless texture from just about any photograph. This is the texture I want to use in my design:

However, when I tile it I get visible seams forming between the individual texture instances.

So how to we fix this?

Step 1:

Open your texture in photoshop and crop it so it’s a perfect square. Have a look at the dimensions of your cropped texture and make sure the height and width sizes are even numbers, for instance 200 x 200 – you’ll see why in the next step.

Step 2:

Go to Filter > Other > Offset and enter an number that is half of the original height/width of your texture. Mine was 200 x 200, so I will enter a number of 100 for both horizontal and vertical values. Make sure “wrap around” is selected.

Step 3:

From here you need to grap your clone tool and start doing some strategic cloning of the edges you can see in your texture. Be extra careful around the outer perimeter of the texture – the sides need to match up so just clone the bare minimum around these parts. If your texture is quite blocky then a clone brush set to a harder edge will work better. For soft textures use a soft edge brush.

And here’s our finished product. This is what it looks like now that it’s tiled. No cracks or seams – much better.

Bonus Tip: Add your seamless texture to your layer styles.

1. Select your seamless texture with the marquee tool and go to Edit > Define Pattern.
2. A dialogue box will appear – give your texture a name.
3. Go to your layer styles dialogue box and click “pattern overlay”. Click the pattern preview box and scroll to the end of the list of thumbnails – there you will see your seamless pattern.
4. Now you can use your custom texture as a ’tileable’ pattern in your designs.

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