This tutorial will address the creation of textures from real life photography. Do not get me wrong, I've seen great textures that are painted from scratch but I think that much faster way of creating textures is from real life photography.

First, lets start from camera selection. There are all sort of cameras that you can pick nowadays, but my recommendation is any Digital Camera.

I am not saying that digital cameras are better then the ones that uses film, but they are just more convenient and faster to work with. Especially if you are starting to play with textures. Actually the best way to preserve photography is to use film, but we are just going to shot the picture and download it to computer for additional painting, so why spending time and money on films, scanners, film development...

And if you are buying digital camera, any camera from 2megapixels and up is ok and try to pick one that has a famous brand name. I've tried all sorts of cameras and ones that come with the name are usually better. Even ones that have a brand name but do not have any additional program adjustments beside automatic ones. I know that you all are waiting for same names so... Nikon Coolpix series can be pretty useful and not expensive. What you get when shooting photos with low quality camera are often images out of focus, not the right color /tend to be greenish/ a lot of sparkles all over the image, etc.

• Try to avoid surfaces that are at the border between shadow and light parts.
• Try not to use flash. You will get parts of the photo that are too much illuminated and other that are too dark.
• Try not to take photos of surfaces that are inside of a tunnel. Light in tunnels comes from the side and photos will always have left or right side lighter then the middle.
• Try not to take photos of curved surfaces.
• Try not to take photos of reflective surfaces like parquet floor, treated wood, plastic, etc.

When standing, try to spread your legs so you are in stable position. If you are taking photo of a vertical surface /wall/ put both of your elbows on to the stomach, wide as you can, while holding camera and use your head as third support. If you are taking photo of the horizontal surface /floor, ground/, spread your legs a little bit wider, you do not want to have a top of your shoe in the corner of the photo, lean both of your elbows beside your chests, do not breath :) and take a shot.

When you want to be closer to the ground or lower parts of the wall, try to kneel with one leg while other is supported with the foot. So you are supported at three points /foot, knee, foot/.

First, open the photo. Then we should check the size of it. By now you should probably know what is the size of the texture map you need. But what ever that size be, the width and height should be even numbers, like 1600x1200 pixels or 1024x768 pixels so you can easily divide them by 2. If for instance one dimension is odd number like 1201 pixels it can not be divided in half (600+600) its 600+601.

So why is this? Because we can create texture map for one particular object (house wall with all the dirt painted and ...) and that map can probably be used only for that object or you can create a map that can be seamlessly tiled and that can be used many times. Ok the first method is much more better and gives more realistic results.. but when you have seamlessly tiled map, you can also use it to texture specific parts of the model that needs additional map painting. So for making seamless tiled texture maps we need width and height that are even numbers, because of the offset filter we are going to use.

Offset Filter will allow us to modify the edges of the photo.

So adjust the size and go to Filters>Other>Offset and fill the fields with the amount that is equal to the half of the width and height of the image. If the images is 1600x1200 then you should put 800 in horizontal and 600 pixels in vertical field. Be sure that Wrap Around option is checked.

So what this Offset filter does, is that cuts photo by the middle in horizontal and in vertical and arrange those 4 parts so the edges of the photo are now at the middle of the photo (image below).

Now its time to paint those edge connections that are visible so they become invisible and everything is just one flat surface.

The best results to paint edges is to use Clone Stamp Tool. Take source for cloning from the middle of one of four parts and apply it to edge connection. To take the source press and hold Alt and click at source point.

There is no particular size of the Clone Stamp you should use. Just try different sizes that are around 10th of the size of the image height. Sometimes is useful to try to adjust opacity of the tool. But this is all up to you.

Now when we have texture map we will create a matching bump map very easy. For example, creating bump map for the reddish texture map above we just have to convert the existing file to black and white and adjust brightness and contrast a little bit.

To convert image to black and white go to Image>Mode>Grayscale

What we have now is grayscale version of our texture map. Depends on the kind of surface we want to get, brightness and contrast can be adjusted.

Go to Image>Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast, and try to move values up and down. For the image below right I decrease brightness a little bit and increase contrast. Image below is much more detailed than the one above, again it depends on your needs what are you going to do.

Other two useful tools are Burn Tool and Dodge Tool. Burn tool will increase the darkness on the areas that its applied and Dodge Tool will do the opposite, increase the brightness.

For example, image below 01 is just stone tiles photo converted to black and white. To make a useful bump map out of it you will need to make stone cubes brighten and ground between stones much darker.

Start with Burn Tool. Size of the Burn Tool will be a little bigger then width of the area between two stones. Or just try what suits you the best. Exposure is put to 52%. And now go over each line between stones and Image number 02 should be the result. It can be clearly seen that space between stones is much darker, what means that those parts of the surface will be deeper.

Then you can use Dodge Tool to make brighter stones. Adjust the size of Dodge Tool a little bit smaller then the average stone size. Set the exposure to around 75% and go over the stones. Result is Image 03. Difference is very noticeable comparing to Image 01.