Several sites out there offer very nice, professional grade patterns. These can add a nice touch to any website and save you a good deal of work. What happens though, if you find that perfect pattern but the colors don’t quite fit with what you had in mind? Fear not, with Gimp, you can easily change the colors of any pattern to achieve just what you want. I’ll cover two different methods to do this.

The first method we’ll use involves layers and desaturation and we’ll start with the following pattern.

Now, let’s go ahead and desaturate the image. Colors > Desaturate.

In the dialog box that pops up, select “Lightness” for the shade of gray and then hit “Desaturate”.

Now, let’s add a new layer that’s going to give the image its color. Layer > New Layer

Pull up the layer dialog, and move the newly layer down below the pattern.

Fill the “new color” layer with the color of your choice and then change the opacity of the pattern layer to achieve the desired effect.

They’re you have it.

Now let’s move to the second method. One drawback with the first approach was that we lost the contrasting colors. This has flattens the image and might not be what’s called for. Let’s see if we can’t try to keep some of the original color.

Starting with the original pattern, we’re going to make part of the image transparent.

Colors > Color to Alpha

Now, select the color picker from the main window and below check “Show info window”.

Select the color you’d like to replace. In the “Show Info Window” that appears, click on the color and drag it over to the “From” box on the “Color to Alpha” dialog. Click on “OK” and the selected color magically disappears.

Now it’s just a matter of creating a layer to move behind the pattern layer and fill it with a color. Much like we did in the first part of this tutorial.

Here’s the end product using this method.

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