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Creating Textures, Patterns, Seamless Tiles, and Backgrounds

Macintosh and Windows software and plugins to generate patterns, textures, and seamless tiles that can be used for fills, desktop wallpaper, Web page backgrounds, surface textures, and more. Also includes background viewers for testing how your backgrounds and textures will look when tiled on a page. Look under more categories for tutorials and tips for making patterns and textures in several software programs.
Making Seamless Background Tiles
Examples and instructions for creating seamless tiles with just about any graphics software.
Seamless Tiles with Simple Filters
Simple Filters is a set of free plugin filter for Windows that are great for making seamless tiles.
Free Seamless Tiles from Your Guide
A collection of over 300 free seamless tile patterns for you to grab and use for pattern fills, backgrounds, textures, and more.
Eye Candy 5: Textures (Win/Mac)
Eye Candy 5: Textures is the next generation of special effects plug-in filters from Alien Skin. With ten texture filters and countless customization options, Eye Candy 5: Textures gives you an infinite variety of unique, seamless textures for your projects.
Gliftic (Win)
[Standalone] Gliftic is an image generator that creates designs according to your specifications of form color scheme and interpretation. $39 US.
Infinity Textures (Win)
[Standalone] A powerful but easy-to-use texture generator and designer. Shareware, $35 US.
SpiroDraw (Win)
[Standalone] Create spirograph-like patterns easily. Shareware.
TextureMagic (Mac)
[Standalone] Create seamless textures from scratch or from existing images with various effects and filters. $49 US Standard, $98 US Pro version.
sTile (Win)
[Standalone] Freeware for creating tiled background images.
XFader (Win)
[Standalone] Transforms any BMP or JPG image into a seamless texture. Includes a texture generator, effects filters, a stereogram generator, and more. $25 US.
Age Technologies - Clicdesign (Win/Mac)
[Plug-in] Plug-in modules for Photoshop and Illustrator especially designed for the apparel, textile, and home furnishing industry.
Allegorithmic MaPZone (Win)
[plugin] A free texture and pattern generator.
AMP Tile Viewer (Win)
[Viewer] "This a program is an image viewer that shows the images in mosaic view. Supports JPG, JIF, GIF, TGA, PCX, BMP, DIB and RLE. When designing a web page this is very useful to check if a tile texture looks fine or to view the look of a large list of tiles."
Andromeda Techtures Filter (Win/Mac)
[Plug-in] Offers over 900 hand rendered tiles which can be modified using "engines" within the filter and dozens of instant special effects: Smoke, Stars, Explosions, Water Droplets, Lightening, Embossing, and dimensional and environmental texturing. Demo available.
ArtMatic (Mac)
[Standalone] ArtMatic uses mathematics to randomly generate patterns, textures, animation, and sounds. $79 download, $99 on CD.
Artlandia SymmetryShop (Win/Mac)
[Plugin] Artlandia SymmetryShop automates pattern design in Adobe Photoshop to create tilings, textile and wallpaper designs, optical patterns, web page backgrounds, and repeat patterns for other applications. The patterns you create with SymmetryShop remain fully editable so that you can change the source and rebuild the pattern, even after the pattern is created.
Background Warper (Mac)
[Standalone] Mac Shareware for generating still and animated seamless backgrounds. $30 US for full version $12 for light version.
Buttonz and Tilez! (Win)
[Standalone] Freeware for creating beveled buttons and rendering seamless textures.
Dazzling Reflections (Win)
Turn photos into kaleidoscopes. "Dazzling Reflections is a software application created with the scrapbooker, crafter and photo enthusiast in mind. With just a few simple clicks of the mouse you will create dazzling one of a kind kaleidoscopes from your own digital images and clip art."
Deep Devices TextureMill (Mac)
[Standalone] Create seamless textures and patterns, add surface treatments, colorize & preview the textures. Shareware $20 US.
Dingbat Magician (Mac)
[Standalone] Free tool for creating colorful logos, patterns, and designs from dingbat fonts. (Scroll down the page for Dingbat Magician.)
FabricWeaver (Win)
[Plug-in] Generate photorealistic woven patterns in Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, and other graphics programs. US $49 - Trial version available.
Genetica Seamless Texture Maker (Win)
Genetica is a texture maker that streamlines the creation of seamless (or tiling) textures. "Because of Genetica's flexible node-based system, all elements of a texture can be edited and rearranged in any desired order... In addition, Genetica will automatically see to the work of making textures seamless."
Iris (Win)
[Standalone] Combine fractal noise, waves, horizontal and radial offsets, and color gradients to create thousands of textures. Freeware.
Mihov Background Tester (Win)
[Viewer] Allows you to preview how an image will look as a background. Freeware
Neu! Filters (Win)
10 free filters for creating abstract patterns.
Pattern Workshop (Win/Mac)
[Plug-in] Create and edit patterns and use them to fill selections in any program that supports Photoshop-compatible plug-ins.
PhotoSEAM (Win)
[Standalone] "Everything you paint, clone or retouch becomes seamless automatically, and you can see the result as you draw." $35 US.
PhotoWeave (Win)
[Plug-in] Design striped fabrics or add pattern effects to your images.
PixelPaper (Win/Mac)
"PixelPaper includes 7 Realistic paper effects including: Bend, Crinkle, Crumple, Crunch, Curl, Fold, and Wave. PixelPaper includes a stand-alone application as well as a plug-in that works with Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro & Corel."
Plaid Lite (Win)
[Plug-in] "Plaid Lite is a Photoshop plugin for creating seamless plaids and tiling tartan patterns. Spin the plaid to any angle, zoom in and out, change the pattern and modify the colors. Create unique web page backgrounds and attractive framed digital photos." US$14.95
RainbowGround (Win)
[Standalone] A wallpaper and Web background image generator utility for Windows. Free Adware.
RealTexture Tools (Win)
[Plug-in] Photoshop plugins for making tilable patterns and textures. Includes Dehaze Filter, Color Correction, AutoTile, Perspective, Synthesis.
Reptile (Win)
[Standalone] "Reptile allows you to easily produce any combination of wavy, bubbly, organic, big, small, wide, narrow, rough or smooth textures. And besides generating a vast range of shapes and surfaces the program also features a great way to color the textures to suit the look and feel you require." US$20.
Seamless Factory (Win)
[Standalone] Seamless Factory is an easy to use texture maker which accurately stitches images into seamless patterns. Also offers image correction commands. Shareware.
Silicon Mirror and Kaleidoscope
[Standalone] The Silicon Mirror is a gadget that operates like the mirrors inside a kaleidoscope. You can use it to create symmetric tiles from your own images. The Silicon Kaleidoscope is a Windows screen saver that uses the Silicon Mirror to create kaleidoscopic images that flow in real time. Time limited evaluation, or $12 US to purchase.
SynTex (Win)
[Standalone] Generate unique tilable images for backgrounds and texture maps. Shareware, $24.95 US.
Terrazzo (Win/Mac)
[Plug-in] Terrazzo creates seamless tiles by applying one of 16 symmetry options to selected image areas.
Tesselation (Win/Mac)
[Plug-in] Turn any graphic into a seamlessly repeating tile for use as Web page backgrounds, desktop wallpaper, or fills.
Texture Anarchy (Win/Mac)
[Plug-in] "With these filters, you can generate and quickly render a massive variety of seamless, infinite textures that range from realistic and organic to bizarre and surreal. The three plug-ins in this suite are Texture Anarchy Explorer (TAE), Tiler Texture Anarchy (Tiler), and Edge Anarchy (Edge)."
Texture Creator (Win/Mac)
[Standalone] Create textures and seamless tiles using a technique called "solid texture synthesis". Includes a gallery of over 200 preset textures that can be modified and rendered to disk at any size or resolution. $99 US.
Texture Processor (Win)
[Standalone] A free program for creating various textures.
Texture Shack Pro (Win)
"Texture Shack Pro can turn your digital photographs into seamless textures or tileable backgrounds. The pro version features multiple layers (with layer masks) and 4 layer blend modes, an alpha channel only paint mode, and tools to correct barrell distortion and extract textures taken at an angle from digital photos."
Texture Workshop (Win)
[Standalone] "Texture Workshop is a multifunctional toolbox which allows to turn practically any picture into a repeatable tile."
TexView (Win)
[Viewer] "Free fast texture browser. Allows easy viewing and manipulation of tiled texture or background bitmaps in BMP, JPEG, and GIF formats."
The Dingbatcave (Win/Mac)
Offers many original dingbat fonts that can be combined to create seamlessly tiling patterns.
Tile Tools (Win)
[Plug-in] A set of 21 filters especially designed for creating tileable images.
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