Hi all - newbie to GIMP. please be gentle.

fencepost - I love your Carbon Fiber pattern. Thanks for posting.

I am trying to create a CF pattern of my own (images below). Two questions:
1) Looks fairly complex. Any suggestions on time savers / mistakes to avoid?
2) Is there a way to create a pattern that acts as a universal texture to various hues? I'd like to be able to apply the pattern for tone-on-tone usage (e.g., chrome, yellow, green, etc.). Do I need to do create multiple patterns, or is there a way to do this with a single pattern?

Thanks in advice for the help.

There are various ways you can change the color.
The yellow one was done by adding a new layer on top of pattern layer and filling it with yellow then setting the layer mode to Difference and merging. You can get other effects by testing out other layer modes.

The red one was done by Colorize. <Image Window Menu> Colors > Colorize. Playing with the sliders can make some nice colors.

In addition to the options O mentioned, you can shift the hue from the Colors/Hue and Saturation menu. You can also shift colors using Color Balance or Curves options from the Colors menu.

Unfortunately, the original pattern is in shades of grey and Hue and Saturation doesn't work on it.

Thanks for the replies and advice, Oregonian and GnuTux. I thought about the Difference and Colorized - will take another look at that. I haven't tried Curves yet - will need to do so.

Oregonian - your results are pretty close to what I was imagining. I could potentially select the Blue pixels (with some variance) to remove them and make transparent. That might allow for a transparent section to allow the richer hue later below to contrast.

What I'd *really* like to learn is how to create the pattern so that it's scalable without seams. Perhaps if I crop to a repeating pattern, then apply image guides by pixel, I can recreate the pattern. Tedious but it might produce the best overall result.

Is there a way to plot pixels by opacity instead of hue?

Oregonian may have already out two and two together on what I'm trying to recreate, because it's Oregonian itself:

Well, I was speaking in general terms regarding options available in GIMP to adjust colors. Although, Hue/Sat does work on both examples posted by avgcivilian. Bump the lightness, then adjust Hue/Sat. With black/white/gray, what I often do is run colorize or colorify as a first step, then move to hue/sat/balance/curves options for more detailed tweaking.


There are various techniques to create seamless patterns. Filters/Map/Make Seamless is a quick and dirty approach. Simple repeating patterns are probably best done manually. I usually make the seamless pattern large, then scale it down as needed.

Have a look through a few of these threads for more methods and ideas.

Discussion split to separate thread...

If you have a grayscale pattern you can set it to about any color by covering it with another layer in Multiply mode and applying the color to that layer.

Thanks, ofnuts.

So, will multiply apply the hue at different saturation levels for the lighter/darker pixels?

You can check that out easily by opening the carbonfiber pattern, make a new layer on top of it and fill with the color of your choice. You can see the different effects layer modes have on it before choosing one. See the image below with instructions.