Tekstya

I'm indebted to Roy Weeks for suggesting this one. A few weeks after the release of xero set 2, Roy contacted me to ask whether I knew of a plugin for generating fine-grained textured tiles for web-page backgrounds. Well, my first thought was that there must be hundreds of them, but when I actually checked... well, there aren't. So, with a little help and encouragement from Roy, I came up with this.

This is a pretty complex filter with lots of controls; the best approach, perhaps, is to click the 'Random' button a few times to see the sort of things it can do. Here's a brief run-down on the essentials, though:

• The textures generated by the filters are generally tileable without any further processing. However, this is only true when generating an image; if you use the filter to texture an existing image, the image itself will not be made tileable. PSP users already have a built-in filter for tiling images, and there are plugins avaliable to do the job too, I think.
   
  
• If you produce a tile that gives visible edges when used on a web page, make sure you save it as a JPG rather than a GIF. This will usually solve the problem. Another tileability issue concerns the 'Sparsity' slider - any value here other than one will produce a non-tileable image, unless the tile size is an integer multiple of the sparsity.
   
  
• The foreground and background colours are selected by clicking on the corresponding buttons. However, each also has a 'Tone' slider that lets you change the lightness of that colour without opening the colour-picker dialog. So, if your texture looks too light or too dark, you can tweak it around and see the result immediately.
   
  
• The 'Density' slider controls the density of the texturing; lower values will allow more of the background to show through. The mid-point usually gives the nicest results!
   
  
• The 'Depth' slider controls the strength of the '3d' effect; low values give a gentle-looking texture, while high values give a surface that looks as though you could scrape your knuckles on it.
   
  
• The 'Highlights' slider sets the strength of the highlights (applied in the foreground colour).
   
  
• The 'Sparsity' slider should usually be left at '1'. Higher values will give a more obviously regular pattern, which is not guaranteed to tile.
   
  
• 'Use source'. If you check this box, the filter will respect the underlying image. Select this option if you want to apply a texture to an existing image, rather than generating a brand-new tile (see below).
   
  
• 'Fill background'. If you check this box, then the image will be completely filled with the background colour before texturing. This is fine for tiles, but be sure to uncheck this box if you want to texture an image!
   
  
• Use the 'Random' button to set the sliders to randomly selected values. This does not change the colour selections - I've assumed that you already know what colours you want, and just want to generate a random texture using them.
   
  
• Use the 'Reset' button to reset all controls to their starting positions.
   
  
• The 'Save' and 'Load' buttons provide basic functionality for saving settings to disk. It's not exactly sophisticated, but it does the job!

Some examples of the kind of tiles Tekstya can produce:

Finally, here's an example of Tekstya being used to texturise a photographic image. The end result looks as though it's been printed on heavy-quality watercolour paper. Click the thumbnail if you don't believe me! The trick with this is to ensure that you check the 'Use source' box and uncheck the 'Fill background' box. Also, set 'Highlights' to zero unless you particularly want to apply additional colouration.