seamless textures for prims

My problem is when i create a texture in PSE(which doesnt have a selections tab).it has a horrible seam which i cant move to a part of the prim that cant be seen.i have been told a fix to the problem is creating a seamless texture,...well,. i have been given some great free programs to accomplish this end,one being Bladgen(which help menu is of little help,..lol) and i believe is SecondLife freindly. Please keep in mind that im relatively new to creating textures and any help in this area is greatly appreciated.

By "PSE", do you mean Photoshop Elements or Photoshop Extended? The old acronyms don't quite work anymore since the Extended versions of PS came out.

Also, what do you mean by "selections tab"? No version of Photoshop has ever had such a thing. What programs have you used that have that tab, and what does it do?

In any case, there are a great many ways to make a texture seamless, in both Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. Here's a relatively simple one:

1. Offest the texture by 50% in both dimensions, to bring the edge to the middle. In Photoshop, you call up the Offset filter by clicking Filter -> Other Offset. I beleive it's the same in Photoshop Elements. In the dialog that pops up, plug in half the height and width of the texture. For example, if the texture is 512x512, offset it by 256x256.

2. Now you'll see the edges of the texture displayed across the center, with the seams forming sort of a cross pattern. Grab the Clone Stamp and/or the Healing Brush, and use it to blend out the seams. This may take some practice if you're not used to using the cloning and healing tools. That's OK; you'll get it. Depending on the particular image, it may take anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes to eliminate the seams entirely. Be prepared to give it as much time and effort as it needs.

3. Optionally, you may want to take a little time to soften any hot and cold spots in the image that might make repetition too obvious. Again, there are many, many techniques for doing that. Which one is best to use will vary from image to image. The cloning and healing tools can be very useful for this, as can the High Pass filter.


That's basically it. As I said, there are lots of other techniques, but the offset & clone method is the simplest one to start with.

SO you know, eliminating seams is a fairly routine procedure, but like anything else, it does take a fair bit of artistic judgment to do it well. There are programs out there that automate the process, and a few of them do work pretty decently for certain kinds of images. But it really takes a human artist to with a human eye to determine the best way to make the seamlessness of each individual picture look nice and convincing. The fact that Photoshop has no magic "make it seamless" button is a very good thing. You might not be quick to agree with me on that now, but after you've gotten a little practice, you will.

Thank u for your reply Chosen and sorry about not fully explaining my problem,it is Photoshop Elements that i was refering to.As i am not as familiar with the other ver. of PS I believe it is an Alpha channel tab i was refering to.I im also led to believe that the full ver. of PS has a few more options than Elements has was all i was refering to.I will try the suggestions u have offered and will post back and let u know how they turned out.I am not nessesarily looking for an easy fix,its just a bit maddening to create what looks to be a good texture and find the seams right in the middle of my prim when uploading it to SL.but thank u again for the help.I`ll keep u posted,..

Hi Chawndra!

You can also use the Offsets on the prim, to move the seams to the edges instead of the middle.

By default, that's the way they should be, so I'm guessing that the prim you're applying the texture to already has offsets. Change those back to 0.00, and the edges of the texture will be on the edges of the prim.

Hope this helps!