How do I even out the brightness on a seamless texture before upload?

I am noticing a lot of shadowy textures being used all over the place that strobe like crazy when tiled .. specially the textures that have Lighting effects..

What are some techniques to balance out the texture so that it tiles more smoothly with regards to brightness and maybe even color balance?

This is a Photoshop Question mainly but also Gimp info would be nice...

I know it's probably impossible to post a photo of something "strobing," but it might help. I'm not sure what you mean by that. When I use the term, I mean the sort of flickering that takes place when textures that both contain alpha are slightly overlapping -- a sort of "flash bulb" effect as I change my angle of view. If that's what you mean, then the answer is (a) to ask yourself whether you really need a 32-bit texture and (b) to be sure the prims don't overlap. Something tells me that you have a different problem in mind, though.

I can't see a good reason why any special lighting effects that you apply in Photoshop would make a difference. After all, those are 2D issues -- simply a matter of how skillfully you use light and dark tones to simulate the appearance of highlights, shadows, and so forth.

The way you apply a texture in world can make a difference, however. I have found that if I use the same texture on adjacent prims of a different type (a cube and a sliced cylinder, for example) or sometimes even a different size (a big cube and a little one), they sometimes end up with different levels of brightness or apparent color. It is an annoying fact of life, but I can't explain it.

What's your definition of "strobe", VonGklugstein? Since you're talking about tiling, I assume you probably mean banding, not strobing, and what you want to know is how to even out hot spots and cold spots. Can you confirm?

yes.. If banding can occur on Sl .. it is the effect you get when you are looking at an area that has severy contrast changes repeated over and over again, making it look like they are strobing as you move around. Typically you see it on large surfaces with a high texture repeat rate across the whole area.. such as Stone Walls or Stone Floors. It looks un-natural to have a shadowy stone wall repeat its pattern over and over.. and there are ways to reduce this effect..

I can't think of any better way to describe it. I will keep my eye out for an example..

Some textures with a more natural pattern shouldn't be tiled without breaking it up and changing the offsets and stretching it to make it look different than the one next to it or close to it.

Yes the same texture on different shapes will break it up and accomplish that.

My question was mainly about " evening out" a area that is meant to be used in a very strict repetitive way. Shadows and hotspots on the other side will meet and cause a " strobing" as your angle of view changes.

If you can picture walking on a floor that has a asymetrical Checkerboard floor.. that will give you a similar experience.

ok.. this is the first random pic I found that clearly shows what I am talking about

I mean really random....



Look at the wall carefully - the shadows will make you dizzy...


also :

See how the towers look fake because of the way the pattern repeats?

in both examples equalizing of the textures would make this look not so brutally wrong..and un-natural

I see what you mean now. I haven't done this yet, but I have thought of trying to compensate for banding in Photoshop by creating a gradient in an adjustment layer to add gray to the lighter side of the texture. You'd have to fiddle with the gradient experimentally quite a bit to get a final effect that looks right. In my head, the method seems rational, but I have no idea how easy it would be in practice, or whether there is a cleaner way to do the job.

there is, but you will lose the luster of the texture... or is that lustre in any case the word lust is in there... and its important not to lose it.. haha


you can make a copy of the layer - invert it and apply a gausian blur to it.. then the fun part..

Flatten! (haha at chosen one on that one ) (yes you make a backup first)

then you tweak the levels one channel at a time until you get it to look as good as it can get.. again..its only one way and there must be better ways

The literal answer to evening out brightness in your image is to reduce contrast. Of course you would not want to do it too much as you would lose too much of your image. At the extreme your image would then become a nice even grey color with nothing else.

I would reccomend precisely identifying the areas of your image that are causing the undesired
effect. Then you could use say...a quickmask to use your paint brush to select this area and then reduce the contrast to some color perhaps matching one of the other colors in your image that is on an upper range.

I LIKE that idea .... and the idea of preserving lust, too. So now you have three techniques to try, counting Infinview's. All of them sound like a lot of trial and error. It would be interesting to see how the results compare.

Looks like I guessed correctly. Banding and hot/cold spots were indeed what you were talking about. See how the castles in your pics look sort of striped? That's banding.

This is an often discussed topic among texture artists, but it hasn't hit this forum in a while. It's good that you brought it up.

There's no single answer for how to deal with the problem. The techniques to employ will vary from image to image. Here are four things I recommend you get good at:

1. The high pass filter is your friend. It's been an indispensable tool in every red blooded texture artist's arsenal for many years. It excels at evening out hot and cold areas of tilable images. See this article for an excellent explanation of what it does and how to use it: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010523/hajba_01.htm

-AND/OR-

2. Give the Shadows/Highlights command a whirl )Image -> Adjustments -> Shadows/Highlights). This is a relatively new feature of Photoshop (introduced with CS), so it's not yet talked about all that often. It does a fantastic job, though, of evening out lighting across an image, relatively quickly and painlessly. It's similar the Levels adjustment, but it operates on shadows and highlights independently, without necessarily affecting the overall brightness or darkness of the image. You'll find its controls are pretty self explanatory, so there's no need to go into tremendous detail on how to use it.


-AND-OR-

3. If you need precise per-pixel control, use the burn & dodge tools on an overlay. First create a new layer above the layer(s) you want to affect, and flood it with 50% gray. Set its blending mode to Overlay, and you'll see it disappear. (50% gray has a value of zero, for overlay purposes.) Now dodge on the overlay on any areas of the image you want to lighten, and burn on it on any areas you want to darken. If the spots you need to affect are particularly harsh, you might want to go with Hard Light for the blending mode instead of Overlay. Soft Light can be effective as well. Experiment with all.


-AND/OR-

4. Color range selections and subsequent adjustments can work wonders. Use Select -> Color Range to select areas of color from the entire image or from any marqueed areas. After you've made your selection, I suggest turning off the marching ants display (View -> Show -> uncheck Selection Highlights), so you have an unobstructed view of the image. Now use any or all of Photoshop's tools to affect just the selected colors. You'll find that adjusting the saturation and lightness (Image -> Adjustments -> Hue/Saturation) will often work very well, and that this technique is wonderful for evening out things like skin tones. Just don't forget to turn Slelction Edges back on when you're done, by the way. If you forget, you can end up all kinds of confused the next time you try to use a marquee.



I think you'll find that numbers 1 and 2 are the ones you'll use 90% of the time, but it's important to get comfortable with all four.

If you're more daring, you can also learn about curves. I myself almost never use them, so I'm not really competent to offer much instruction on the subject, but for those who know what they're doing with them, they're extremely powerful.



ETA: By the way, for all kinds of tips and good instruction for topics just like this, I highly recommend Luke Ahern's book, "3D Game Textures: Create Professional Game Art Using Photoshop". It's chock full of good information on this subject, and far more.

Thanks for the great answers so far...

I was researching this subject and figured it would make a great topic here.

it is probably the hardest task to make a texture that is not a boring simple repeated pattern still tile perfectly in more than one way.

With "organic" subjects like Stone Walls that do not really tile in the real world it is even more difficult to create the illusion of seamlessness.. virtually any pattern can be annoying if repeated over and over

Some of the tools you mentioned work well and I have been using the Low Pass only in severe cases of color shift across the image and in addition to color range and manual fingerbanging of the image... but I found that All Filters will degrade the image slightly so I was looking to explore new approaches as well. i will explore the high pass as it seems to be easier to manipulate the image back to a decent color..

It would be great to still see some more oppinions from others on this subject. I am specially interested in the advanced methods that someone who wears the label " Texture Artist" would use to approach old Stone walls.

I have been playing with the luminance and soft light blending mode on a with a inverted layer that sits on top of the master layer.


Again.. looking to hear more on this subject.

Keep in mind that you can perform all of your filter actions on a separate layer either as a whole
or just the selected portions of your image you are trying to adjust.

So this is a research project huh? Perhaps that is why your questions sound funny.
It sounds like you are looking for answers that you already know.

that is a good idea.. I just started exploring the processing of filters then flattening the image and then re-inserting a composite layer of the best unfiltered original that I can make, so I can blend in some of the wanted shadows and original color if I have to. Again it seems like an awkward way to do it.

My problem is that specially with stone I have a hard time keeping the colors vivid and alive looking.

I am sure this is one of those How many songs can I write using 3 Chords kind of question... and ... If I knew all the answers for sure I would keep them a secret... lol

I found that sometimes after getting the effect I want, and it's become dull, I just apply 8 to contrast and brightness, it works for me.

You mentioned stone a couple of times now, seamless and keeping the colours vivid.

Seamless is much easier than you might think even with stone, especially things like hand made/laid brick wall textures.
The problem with seamless or tileable textures is people do not fully understand what they are, or how to go about designing a seamless texture. Seamless means exactly what it says, no seams or in simple terms no joins, so what is at the bottom when repeated must join with the top and whats on the left must join with the right.

To make a seamless wall texture quickly I would start first with 2 layers, a layer filled with Black which will be my background or bottom layer and my texture to work on.

Selecting my texture layer I would cut it in half vertically. Taking the left half and moving it to the right of the canvass, then the right half moving it to the left.
At this stage I would have snap on when doing this as it makes life a little easier to postion the textures on the canvass.

Now in theory I have a tileable texture horizontally (left to right) but I have a seam in the middle.
Taking a copy from either the left or the right and positioning it in the middle I would then select eraser and using a soft mechanical brush, hardness set to zero then I would adjust/reduce Opacity/flow or both.

Now having the eraser set up, I would run down the seams of the lines on both sides of the middle texture with the 2 other texture layers behind so I can see how my middle texture blends into them. I always stop start rather than make one continuos erase. It can take several minutes to blend both sides into the 2 textures behind.

After I have done this it would appear that the textures are all blended but they are not. Here I would select just the middle texture and the black layer behind. I can now see that although I had erased the texture to blend into the other textures there is a sharp line which needs to be completely erased so only the shading of the texture can be seen.

Having completed this part I would then dulpicate and merge the layers, save the image as a patern, open a new file and set the image size 4 times to that of the original.
I would then fill this layer with the patern and check for any inconsitencies, if found I would just go back to the original and erase the parts in question some more.

Once I am happy that the texture tiles horizontally I would dulpicate/merge the layers, ( I always keep the originals right till the end) and then with this I would repeat the above cutting it horizontally in half and moving the textures from top to bottom respectively.

Once the texture is complete I can then start adding various effects. Something that is seldom mentioned is the use of Blending Options. This is always my first part of changing and adding various effets to my textures. The options here are endless, you can bevel, emboss, add texture overlays, paterns,satin effect etc etc etc.

Once I have the texture complete I would normally move onto the the options found in image adjustments. Prior to using these features I always duplicate so that I can compare new to old.

There is no set routine as to which of the image adjustments I will use, it does however take practice and a general understanding of what they can all do. My only advice is to familiarise yourself with them and test, try their many capabilities.

I think it is virtually impossible to tell anyone how to use them because and I am assuming that if you are designing something from scratch and you have that picture in your mind, which in most cases I do, it is impossible for me to fully picture that picture, only you can do that and thats much the same with adding the various effects, colors, shading etc. What you see may not be the same as what others will see or like.

Another point I would like to make that has been mentioned before when designing seamless textures and that is the white line that sometimes appears on upload when the texture is finally applied and repeated on prims.
The tip I would suggest is when you have your final image is complete and saved, and saved just to make double double sure then Iwould do the following.

If the image was a seamless one I would duplicate it 4 times so I have 5 in total. Not touching the top layer but moving down to each of the others I would move each one off the canvass a few pixels, one to the left, one ot the right, one up and one down.
Then I would just reduce the image, save as tga. 32 bit if channels are included if not always 24 bit.

Although I have seen this mentioned in this thread and others previously, I never ever flatten images for SL, there is absolutely no point. The end result can lead to the loss of the original artwork if you do not know what you are doing.

Have a nice day.

LL

I forgot, also the lighting effects under the render filter is extremel useful, again this takes practice and understanding.

Let me save you a little time, Larrie. The Offset filter is your friend. There's no need to do all that cutting and moving. Simply offset the layer by half the image's width and height.


I would encourage you to forget that the eraser even exists. It's destructive. Instead, use layer masks. The afford far more control, and their effects can be changed or undone at any time.

I'd also suggest that you experiment with the clone stamp, healing brush, and spot healing brush, to paint over the seam, rather than erasing it. Erasing (or masking) isn't always the best solution, especially for things like brick work, irregular stone masonry, hedges, etc..




Again, let me save you a ton of time. With the Offset filter, you can take care of the horizontal and vertical all at the same time, in one single operation. All that cutting and moving stuff around by hand is a tremendous waste of time and effort.


I'm curious why you'd apply blending effects and other adjustments after making your texture seamless instead of before. I HIGHLY recommend going the other way around. Eliminating seams should pretty much always be the last thing you do, or else you'll just have to do it twice instead of once if you want the texture to remain seamless, which again is a waste of time.

Chosen

I really appreciatte your comments and remarks, however, I just posted that for simplicity.

When I first started using PS years ago I had to learn by myself and take what was given to me at that time.

However, as technology has advanced and moved on I still apply the basics before moving on to using the options available. Its more fun and rewarding.

Whether to say that was right or wrong who knows but at the same time I have developed and created more skills and an overall understanding in which most software (Photo/3d design) packages work. We all have our own workflow and ways of doing things.

Without getting to complex which at times can be overwhelming when a simple question is asked, is it not best to understand what the question is and answer the basics first.

Its more or less the same answer we give to those who ask various questions about building in SL, first familiarise yourself with the SL building tools, visit the Ivory Towers, if need be visit and attend some of the education/building course's available in SL and if you still struggle and have unanswered questions then come back to the forums and ask.

Well, this really is much the same as using PS or other software packages. People need to learn and understand the basics first. No matter how you dress them up, sing about them or try to tell others the way to do things, if they do not know what makes the engine run then they are going to at some stage run out of petrol, or if they fail to oil the engine which makes it go round then there is no need for the petrol in the first place.

Your comments and support is absolutely without a doubt very useful for many that have a general understanding of PS, Gimp, Blender, Maya, Paintshop, etc etc, but there are many people out there that are willing and able but have very little understanding be it the way in which these software packages work or let alone the terminology associated with them.

So, to answer one point you mentioned in relation to my post several times the offset filter, yes I am very aware of this and we have had this discussion in the past. (despite the fact I actually used it for something that was meant to be related to the slice tool but thats another story you might care to forget or remember).

My understanding is that with the forums, posting here either in Texturing or the building forums is to obtain help, assistance and guidance but lets not assume that every question comes with the knowledge and experience that a lot of us have gained already.

I think I can say this, yourself along with others including myself have always said that we need more content creation and not just the general rip offs, copies and freebies we so often see. Therefore a lot of people are looking for originality and not just something we can pick up off the internet through a google search and modify in more ways than one.

There are a lot of people in SL that for the first time would like to design and use their own imagination and skills to contribute.

They are willing to learn, design and create but have little or no knowledge of how to go about it.

Yes they can download a handful of freebie software from the internet but with most there is little or no help regarding supporting documentation.

For those that are unfamiliar and have little or no understanding, it is those people that we need to teach and encourage be it basic or advance.

So,
sorry to ramble on but to come to a close,
I cannot commend you enough for your hard work and long posts you offer and contribute to the many users of SL, my only suggestion is give a thought to those that are less knowledgeable, those that perhaps are not able to learn the lingo, terminology and the many options and capabilities that the software packages have to offer, read between the lines and start with the basics in order for all readers to understand.
I am sure that those more experienced will comeback with a follow up question in the event of 'I already know that' but 'what about this' or 'that'.

Larrie, thanks for the kind words of commendation, but I'm afraid the majority of your post was lost on me. What was it you felt was beyond beginner level in my response(s) here?

I appreciate what you said about starting with the basics, but I'm confused by your implication that that's somehow not what I was doing. I'll grant you, in my response to your earlier post here, I didn't give the kind of step-by-step "head bone's connected to the neck bone"level of detail that I so often include in my posts, but that doesn't mean it wasn't beginner-level. I'm sure you can appreciate I can't define every single word I use every single time I post. Sometimes I am pressed for time, and I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that someone might reply with "Hey, what's that?" if I happen to mention some piece of terminology they've never heard of before (or that they might Google it or, heaven forbid, actually search for it in the PS Help file). As much as it might be nice if it could be done, it's simlply not possible to define every word in every post.

That said, I can certainly make an effort to be more explanative if need be. What did I say here that you think might be over anyone's head? I'd really like to know.


The only thing I can think of that arguably might be considered maybe slightly advanced-beginner was my recommendation of layer masks over the eraser. But I'm of the school of thought that it's best not to teach bad habits, even when they happen to be a little more obvious than good ones. And as far as I'm concerned, the eraser is a VERY bad habit. Sure, it's an obvious item to grab, but that doesn't mean one should.

The eraser is actually one of the most commonly misunderstood tools in Photoshop's enture arsenal. It's only really meant for one thing. It's intended to be used in conjunction with the paint brush (or any other painting tool), in real time, the same way you'd use a RL eraser at the same time as you use a pencil. It's absolutely NOT meant to be a post-processing tool, not at all. Just as no one in the physical world would ever think of using an eraser to remove a section of a pre-existing photo, no one in the digital world should ever use one to remove part of a pre-existing texture, whether it be for seam-removal or any other purpose. Non-destructive workflow is the key to long term success in digital art, and that's what I strive to instill in all new students, from day one. There's nothing non-beginner about that.

In the first Photoshop class I ever took when I was brand new, we learned about masking within the first week. I realize most people who are self-taught usually stumble across the eraser first, since it's far more obvious, and many such people tend to consider masks to be "advanced", even uncomfortably foreign, since they don't tend to discover them until months (or in some cases, years) later. But that doesn't mean there's anything actually non-beginner-level about them. They are very simple tools, and the sooner people learn to use them comfortably, the more successful they'll be in ALL their digital art endeavors.

Other than that, everything else I suggested was absolutely Photoshop-lesson-one level stuff.

The Offset filter, for example, is fairly self explanatory in its function. Still, I suppose I did fall a bit short of my own usual bar level by not mentioning where to find it, for the sake of new readers. So if that's what you meant, point taken. If anyone needs to knows, it's Filter -> Other -> Offset.

If you meant to imply, though, that that filter itself is somehow harder for newbies than your cutting & moving method might be, all I can say to that is I couldn't disagree more. Any operation that is unnecessary complicated will always be harder for newbies to perform than one that's simpler. Moving things around the canvas with precision takes practice, and is exceedingly prone to human error, even for those who know what they're doing. The Offset filter, by comparision, is relatively error-proof, and is absolutely a beginner-level tool. There's nothing advanced about it.

Beyond that, I quickly mentioned experimentation with the cloning and healing tools instead of erasing every time. Again, I see nothing non-beginner about that. Experimentation with ALL tools is what every newbie should do every single day. What could be wrong with recommending particular ones for particular tasks?

To be fair, I did consider posting some quick instructions for how to clone out and/or heal out a seam, rather than erasing or masking it, but as I said, I was a little pressed for time, and I've already done that in this forum probably a hundred times or more. If someone wants detailed instructions, they can reply and ask, or they can search the forums for previous posts on the subject.

I think that covers everything I said. Again, what do you feel wasn't beginner level?