How-To

So you have a great shot of some knotty tree bark or a field of flowers, or whatever, that you think would make a great background for a web page. You really don't want to use the whole thing. With today's cameras that would be a huge file and take forever to load.

The obvious solution is to use a photo editing program to crop a representative piece from the photo and let the html background capability automatically make enough clones to fill the necessary space. That does work, but... well, why don't you go ahead and try it and see. My guess is that the result will elicit a 'yuk!' or 'ew...' or possibly even activate the old gag reflex. In short, whatever picture the clip might be from, it looks terrible because the edges don't match, so you have a lot of chaotic random looking tiles in your background. Probably not what you had in mind.

Fixing this so all the pieces blend seamlessly can be a fairly simple process... if you use the right program. Since a lot of people use Photoshop, I'll give you some solutions for that first. The first method involves a lot of tedious matching by eye that you have to do. Then there is the shearing method which also seems to involve a lot of gratuitous fiddling. You'd think a powerful program like Photoshop would include a method for making backgrounds seamless that would be a little simpler to use but, if so, I haven't found it either.

Since I like to use linux tools whenever possible (and I don't like complicated solutions for what should be a simple process) I gave the Gimp a shot. The Gimp is a free program (as are most linux programs) that works under virtually any flavor of linux or unix. I use Ubuntu linux because it is designed to be more user friendly than other 'flavors'... but that's another topic.

To make a photo seamless in the Gimp simply choose from the dropdown menus: 'filter' then 'map' then 'make seamless'. Then save it under the filename you want to use as your web page background. Whew, that was hard. :) There may be some photo clips this will not work with but, so far, it has worked very well for me. Yup, the background for this site is one of them.

I can hear all the "but I don't use linux" uproar building in the background already. It probably wouldn't hurt to give it a try but, never fear, you can get a Windows version of the Gimp free now too.

Whether you go for painfully complicated or quick and simple, you can now turn all those prize-winning photos into eye-catching seamless backgrounds for your web pages.