Tileable Photo Textures: by Jeff Frazer                   page: 1 2 3 4 5

A Day in the Life:
First off you are going to need some images. I carry my digital camera with me everywhere and take shots of everything. Its true! If you don't believe me ask my girlfriend! She was a bit embarrassed by me taking photos of dirt and bathroom tile. She had a shirt made up that says "I'm not crazy I'm a game designer"! =) What are ya gonna do? Anyway, I think you get my point.
Big Board Teture
Getting Started:
Here we go. If you haven't already, go ahead and fire-up Photoshop© and open the image you want to work on. I'm going to use a wood texture I snagged off of the web. You can download it here if you want to use it. The zip file also contains the finished texture. The first thing we need to do is to select all (CTRL-A), cut (CTRL-X) and paste (CTRL-V). Name the texture layer "Big Board" or something. I always like to save (CTRL-S) after every step for safety. During this tutorial, if I save my project I'll stick a (CTRL-S) in the text to recommend that you do the same.
Jeff says save often!
Looking at the image, I can see that the boards aren't in very good shape. Some of them are out-of-whack, some are cracked, etc. Contrary to what you might think, this is a good thing! Its called variety folks and, repeat after me, we love variety (sorry!). Enough of that. The first thing I did was remove the two boards on the far right. This will give me a straight edge to work with. To do this we need to select everything up to the seem between, the fifth and sixth boards from the left and then crop it.

More texture fun

click to enlarge