Photo textures of curved surfaces

I’d like to be able to take a photo of a curved surface and use it as a texture. There is never perfect lighting and lighting will always result in a color shadow gradient that effects the continuity of textures when UV mapped.

Is there a facility (in GIMP or where ever) to smooth out the effects of lighting shadow gradients ? That is, to average the color across an object, to remove the effect of lighting shadow gradients ?

For example, if I take photos of a peeled banana to use as a texture, how do I make the photo texture “continuous” so that I can UV map it around my model, without showing banding ?

I hear gimp has a good seamless plugin, but I haven’t tried it. another thing you can do, though, is to take a sample square of it, and adjust the offset, so that the edges are in the middle of the image, then clone over the seams using the cloning tool.

I found a few tutorials about how to do this in Photoshop, but hopefully they’re easy to translate into GIMP. Both basically use a high-pass filter technique to even out the luminace variation across the image. Of course, to make it seamless, you’ll still have to do the offset/clone-over-seams technique that Modron describes.

http://www.3drender.com/light/EqTutorial/tiling.htm

Thanks guys. I followed the tutorial in Paint.net … the steps are identical to Photoshop.