The Seamless Tiling Effect

In this tutorial, we'll take an overview of the Seamless Tiling effect. Use this effect (which replaces PSP7's Convert to Seamless Pattern) to make your own seamless background tiles. It works particularly well with heavy-textured, natural materials like the one I use here.

Open an image that you want to use as the basis for your seamless tile. If you're not sure what to use, try this:
Choose Effects > Image Effects > Seamless Tiling, which opens this dialog:

First notice the three Tiling Methods:
- Edge: Blends the edges of the image.
- Corner: Blends the image at corners you define.
- Mirror: Mirrors the edges of the image.
Select each of the Tiling Methods and notice how different Settings become available or unavailable with each method:
- With Edge, Width (%) and Transition (%) are available.
- With Corner, Horizontal Offset (%) and Vertical Offset (%) are available, as are the Corner Styles (Linear and Curved).
- With Mirror, Horizontal Offset (%) and Vertical Offset (%), and Width (%) are available.
Another group of settings are the Direction options. Choose Bidirectional for an image that tiles seamlessly in both directions. This is the setting you'll want for Windows wallpaper, for example, or for a Paint Shop Pro Pattern. Choose Horizontal if you want the image to tile across only, and choose Vertical if you want the image to tile up-and-down only.

The remaining control is the Show Tiling Preview checkbox. Check this to open a preview window that shows what your tile will look like in use. Here's what the preview window looks like:

You can use the Zoom In and Zoom Out buttons in the preview. You can also check the Show Original checkbox in order to see what the original image would look like if it were tiled.

Which method and other settings to use will depend on what effect you want to achieve. Try each one to get a feel for what each will do.
Something else to keep in mind as you explore the Seamless Tiling effect is that you can protect any part of your image by selecting that part before invoking Seamless tiling. If part of your image that you want to keep distinct keeps getting blurred, try selecting that part of the image and then give Seamless Tiling another go.

And that is really all there is to Seamless Tiling. Try it out on several different images, or try it with copies of a single image using different tiling methods or other variations on the settings. Depending on what you use as your base image, your results might be pretty wild or they might look quite naturalistic. Wild or natural, some very attractive tiles can be produced with Seamless Tiling.