Textures are a very important part of Second Life. Textures allow prims to appear realistic. This chapter introduced some of the most common techniques used with Adobe Photoshop to create textures. This included cropping and alpha channels.

    Cropping allows unneeded portions of an image to be discarded. The image or canvas can also be resized. When the image is resized, the actual image is stretched to the new size. When the canvas is resized, the parts of the image that do not fit within the new canvas size will be removed. Alpha channels allow parts of an image to appear transparent. Any area selected for inclusion in the alpha channel will appear transparent. This is very useful for creating windows.

    Tileable textures can be placed next to each other without seams between them. Therefore, textures can easily be reproduced to cover a large area. The next chapter will introduce methods for creating tileable textures in Photoshop.