How do I make my own texture?

I shot quite a few photos of brick walls, but no matter how detailed I work on them, I can’t make them as good and tileable as those on CG Textures. I looks like all my photos, even though shot with a good camera (Canon, 600D) are all “warped” as if there was a lens distortion applied to all my photos.

Also, I can’t make them seamless.

Do you know of any good and decent tutorials (preferably video tutorials!) that guides me from the very first shooting of the photo, to making a usable texture out of it, and to make it seamless?

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=create+tileable+texture+from+photo

seamless is easy, use GIMP. the trick is to import the jpeg(that’s what most cameras produce) or other image into gimp then use filters–>map–>make seamless which will automaticaly make the edges seamless so they can match up. in some cases this does weird things, especially when trying to make an image of concentric dots into something seamless but it is usually good. for a photo good enough to use as a texture you MUST have the camera lens exactly parallel to the surface or you will have no end of problems.

Like Richard pointed out, there are a lot of videos on how to do it. This is the method I use via photoshop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SiYt92RINo

Basically you will want to offset the texture with wrap around enabled, then use the clone stamp tool to remove the seam. It takes a bit of practice to make it look uniform. Additionally, with bricks, you really have to focus on it being uniform in scale. You can use the transform tool to adjust the texture to make it more even, but then you will be required to do some touch up with selection (with some feather) and clone brush. On top of that, you will be required to play with the exposure and other levels in order to make the lighting and color more uniform as well.

You will want to be doing all this with a pressure sensitive stylus like a wacom btw.

If you do not have access to Photoshop, Krita has a GREAT wrap around mode you can use, its image editting tools are a bit lacking atm though.

There’s also Mapzone which is kind of old and limited to 2k texture sizes, but it’s free and its procedural generation algorithms have stood up well in texture realism (due to it being capable of creating decent textures of things like bricks with no photography needed).

As far as Krita’s image editing tools are confirmed, I thought they decided not to make that route a priority due to a lack of developer resources, has that changed since then?

also have a look at shoebox , the texture ripper does a quick job of squaring up angled photos
http://renderhjs.net/shoebox/

before you try the seamless thing

I think adobe Photoshop is best for creating seamless texture.

Years ago, seamless textures were used primarily for desktop wallpaper and web page backgrounds. Today, high resolution textures are used for a variety of design applications including 3D texture mapping. This tutorial will show you how to create your own seamless texture from a digital photograph.

1)Selecting a Photograph

2)Resize the image

Select Image > Image Size. Now enter width and height.

3)Offset the Image

We will now “offset” our texture into four equal parts. The offset is what allows the image to repeat (or tile). From the top menu bar select Filter > Other > Offset.
The offset image clearly has a vertical and horizontal “seam”. We will eliminate those using the Clone Tool. But first, lets even out the color a bit.

4)Duplicate the Layer / Set Blend Mode
Now duplicate the layer and change the top layer’s blend mode to “luminosity”.

5)Adjusting Color with High-Pass Filter
From the top menu bar, click Filter > Other > High Pass. Enter 18.0 for the Radius. You can experiment with different radius settings. I normally use a setting between 15-20 depending on the image. The lower the number the more drastic the change.

6)Removing the Seams with the Clone Tool

With the clone stamp tool (formerly known as the rubber stamp tool), you can copy, or clone copies of a portion of an image and paint them onto any other part of the image. The size of the area copied depends on the brush size you select from the brushes pop-up menu on the tool’s options bar.