Make Your Image Seamless & Tileable

From one motif to a tiling file

1. Crop the source square before you load it. Every cell in the repeat grid is drawn as a square, so a 1200 × 800 px source gets squeezed horizontally into the cell rather than sitting in it — circles turn into ovals and lettering leans. The working tile is also capped at 1200 px on its longest side, so there is no benefit to feeding it a 6000 px scan.
2. Pick the Layout first, because it changes what a good edge looks like. Straight repeat and Half-drop both butt the tile's right edge against its own left edge, so both need genuinely matched borders. Mirror does not — it flips alternate columns and rows, so every edge meets a reflection of itself. That makes it seamless by construction but useless for anything containing text or a face.
3. Raise Edge blend until the border stops announcing itself. The slider is a percentage of the tile, and it cross-fades a copy shifted diagonally by half the tile's width and height back over the original, weighted by each pixel's distance to the nearest edge. At 10% on a 1200 px tile that is a 120 px ramp inward from every side; the 30% maximum is a 360 px ramp, wide enough to visibly ghost a second copy of your motif into the border.
4. Turn on Seam check and look at the centre cross. Ordinarily a tile boundary sits wherever the grid happens to put it, which is a poor place to inspect it. Seam check offsets the grid so a boundary lands exactly on the dashed crosshair in the middle of the preview — the spot your eye is already resting on.
5. Add Show seam lines when you are not sure what you are looking at. The sub-toggle only becomes available while Seam check is on, and it outlines every tile boundary. It is the honest test: switch the outlines back off, and if you can still say where they were, the tile is not finished.
6. Set the Background, then the export size, then download. The export paints the Background colour across the canvas before any tiles are drawn, so it is not a preview aid — it is baked into the PNG. The file you get is a full sheet holding the same grid as the preview, at the current Tile scale.

Repeat scale: the same tile on three products

What catches people out on their first fabric order is that a tile is a physical size, not a pixel count. Nothing in the file says “four inches”. The print service decides how many pixels go into an inch, and that one choice decides whether your motif arrives the size of a coin or a dinner plate.

Work it through with the defaults. The export size selector opens on 3600 × 3600 px and Tile scale sits at 3×3, so the sheet holds nine tiles and each one is 3600 ÷ 3 = 1200 px across. Printed at 300 DPI the sheet is 3600 ÷ 300 = 12 inches and one tile is 1200 ÷ 300 = 4 inches. Send the identical file to a service running 150 DPI and the same pixels stretch to 3600 ÷ 150 = 24 inches for the sheet and 1200 ÷ 150 = 8 inches for the tile. Same file, double the motif, and you did not change a thing.

A 4-inch tile is a comfortable quilting-cotton print — a few repeats across a fat quarter, readable from across the room. The same tile on gift wrap is small and busy, which is usually right there, since wrapping paper is seen in fragments and a large motif gets cut in half by the box. On a phone case it fails: the printable panel is only a few inches across, so one repeat fills it and the result reads as a random crop of a picture rather than as a pattern. For small products, raise the Tile scale to pack more repeats into the same sheet. The theory behind matching edges is in our guide to making seamless patterns with the offset technique; scale is the decision you can only make against a real product.

Checking a tile before you upload it

• Push Tile scale to 8×8 and step back from the screen. At 3×3 almost anything looks fine. Shrink the tiles and two faults surface: tram lines, where one bright or dark pixel row at the tile edge repeats into a ruled grid, and clumping, where a heavy motif near a corner meets three copies of itself and forms a blob.
• Check whether your eye traces a diagonal. A motif sitting slightly off centre lines up corner to corner across the grid and produces a diagonal drift nobody designed. Half-drop hides vertical alignment but makes diagonals worse, so switch between it and Straight repeat and see which one your eye resists.
• Decide the Background colour before you download, not after. There is no transparent export option — the canvas is flooded with whatever the Background swatch holds and the tiles go on top. Soft or transparent edges fuse with that colour permanently, so white artwork on white silently loses its outline.
• Confirm the sheet is square and the source was too. The export is always square, and services that tile by area will take that as a promise. If the image you loaded was not square, every cell was stretched to fit and the distortion is now in all nine copies — crop and reload rather than trying to correct it downstream.