I hope you have been admiring my charming backgrounds. I am hooked on making these cute little tiles with the Simple Filters. Note that the Simple is capitalized, these are indeed simple to use but that is also their name. There are 9 of them in the bunch but four of them are my favorites for making little tiles. You can download them here. Just unzip them into your plugins folder.
Start with a picture that has colors in it that you like. Set your Standard Selection Tool on Square, Fixed size, 100 pixels (you can vary this if you want larger tiles or want to capture more of the picture. Make a selection that has a variety of colors in it.
If you want a more muted rendition of the colors try the 4 Way Average, this does not give a perfectly symmetrical tile so I usually follow up with the Pizza Slice mirror, here are the results of those two steps on the same selection.
Here is Pizza Slice Mirror followed by Blintz
Pizza Slice Mirror followed by Centre Tile.
Pizza Slice Mirror followed by Diamonds.
Isn't this fun, I could sit here doing it all day. Of course, you can select another spot on your picture and start all over, you can lighten them either with the Brightness control or by flood filling with a transparent white. You can use the Hue and Saturation control to change the colors. Some of my tiles were made from selections from the background on my home page. When I ran out of those I started on pictures. I did use the hue shift on some so they would all have some lavender content. Remember that SmartSaver will save only the selection, so you can just make and save batches of these very quickly. You can make one, save it, undo and try a different combination.
