Have you ever needed a background with no seams or repeats in it for a website or some other digital project? I’ve been struggling with finding how to do this for some time. Then this week when I was working on a website project, I was having problems finding a seamless background that didn’t cost a fortune.They are readily available at stock photo places, but the cost for a large enough image was enough that I wanted to research another solution.
I thought about Paint.Net http://www.getpaint.net/download.html because I’d heard it was a powerful Photoshop-like program, free and has many great features. Then I started doing some searches on making seamless backgrounds using paint.net and I found that Paint.Net has forums, documentation and even video tutorials. I also found this link in the forum. It leads to a plugin that I downloaded for my seamless background project. It’s called Seamless Texture maker.
I did a video to demo how to use the plugin to make a seamless website or digital background. It’s really quite easy.
I downloaded the zip file (see image below), and then I right-clicked on the folder and told it to unzip and then show the contents of the folder. Then I saw the .dll file and and followed the instructions to move it to the C:/Program Files/Paint.Net/Effects folder. Make sure you’ve closed Paint.Net before putting the .dll file in the Effects folder.
Now you’re ready to open up Paint.Net and you can find your new plugin available to you when you go to Effects>Distort>Seamless Texture Maker. When you click on Texture Maker, a new screen will open up where you can play around with the settings. I go over these in the video.
In the video, I show you two ways to make the seamless background. The first way, I resized my image to be 900 pixels high and checked the aspect ratio to keep things in ratio, and it made it 900 pixels wide too. THEN I applied the Seamless Texture effect. The second way was to NOT resize the image and use the Seamless Texture tool. You can see how they both look in the video. The one that looked best to me was the first way.
It turned out great – I applied it to my test website background and no seams! Success!
See my before and after snippets. You can see the seam on the first image, but not the second!
From my experience, you will need to start with an image with enough resolution/pixels to make a background. I really can’t tell you what it needs to be (not a graphic artist at all), but I can tell you that the image I used for the demo was a small 380 x 380 pixel and 56K image from iStock photo. It was a ‘comp’, something you can download for free to see if it’ll work with your project.
There are other ways to accomplish making seamless backgrounds, what have you found? Share in the comments please.