tool for creating seamless pattern?

I'm a designer, that uses Illustrator and Photoshop to create my artworks. Now I know it can be done in photshop and illustrator but the process is kinda time consuming, You have to keep adjusting the position just to achieve seamless pattern.

Now if there a software or plugin that will make your life easy, I would definitely would like to know.

Thanks!

Solution 1:

Try this:

http://www.redfieldplugins.com/filterSeamlessWorkshop.htm (free)

Solution 2:

If you just need to creating seamless textures in Photoshop (or similar) you can do it manually by this procedure:

• create a blank image (say 200x200) and fill with noise (color or mono, uniform or gaussian)
• triplicate the canvas size (say, add 200 pixels in each border) and copy the original noisy square to the eight sourroding empty positions (this step can be placed in a macro)
• now, play with the image, retouching it as you like, but restricted to operations that only affect the pixels colors individually or operate on a local neighbourhood (in a translationally invariant way). For example, all of this operations are allowed: lighness or color adjust, equalize, blur, sharpen, median filter, maximum/minimun filter, FIR filter, emboss, border detection/enhacement ... You can make as many of this operations as as you like, and do the same in other layers, and combine them as you like.
• finally, crop the 200px borders to recover the original 200x200 image. it will be perfectly seamless, apt for tiling.

I make some stereograms, and I create most of the underlying patterns by this procedure.