Ana and I met today to talk about the next part of the assignment for the students. We want to continue the tile project, but move briefly into the digital realm and use some of their mad Photoshop skills we have been hearing so much about. Photoshop has several tools that make creating tiling patterns easy – the one we are going to use is the “Offset” Filter. This technique is really handy for making textures for backgrounds, or for 3-D models and the like. In a nutshell, the Offset Filter cuts your image that you want to tile into 4 pieces (equal quarters or otherwise) and slides each piece sideways so that the edge of each of piece that was in the middle is now on the outside edge of the overall tile. This makes the edges tile smoothly, but does leave the middle rough. This is easy enough to fix using a variety of other Photoshop tools. Sound confusing? It really isn’t, once you see it in action:

To start out, open an image in Photoshop. I am going to start with a picture of some nice tree bark from photoready.co.uk:

After I open up this image to work on, I like to open another copy of the image before I do anything else. This will come in handy in a minute. Also, don’t forget to save an original copy of the image before you do anything – just in case you mess something up – Photoshop rule number one – you never want to work on original images!

Next, open the Offset Filter. Go to Filters > Other > Offset…

Our original image is 341 pixels wide by 477 pixels high. In the Offset Filter dialog box, I will enter 170 x 235, this will roughly quarter the original image. As this filter begins to make more sense to you, you can play with these settings to get the image quartered just the way you like it.

The image will now look like this:

As you might guess, the image will tile ok, but will still look kinda funky in the center where the tile edges don’t line up (you can check it out here). To fix the tile up, basically all you have to do is cover up those seems in the offset version, and you are done.This is where your mad Photoshop skills come into play.

Go back to your original image and using the lasso tool, copy and paste portions of that image back into the offset version. When I cut and paste a piece out of the original, I usually will usually feather the selection by 2~4 pixels to get it to blend well with the background. Here is an image in progress – you can see where I have lifted the knot from the original and placed it in the new version:

Continue to copy and paste portions from the original to cover up each of the seams in the new tile. Once you have it pretty well coverd up you can begin to use the rubber stamp tool to blend in the remaining visible seams. The only thing you have to really be careful of is to not change the outer edges of the new version – if you do, those edges will not line up cleanly when it is tiled. This is what my final tile looks like:

So, that is it – if you want to see what the final version looks like all tiled together – check it out here.