As I said before, "The gimp" as Freeware and almost as good as photoshop. It was produced for/by the linux community and then ported as well to win32:
http://www2.arnes.si/~sopjsimo/gimp/stable.html
You first need to install the GTK+2 Package then install the Gimp Package. Both can be found on the page.
As for the tiling textures I have to say that tiles are oftenly obvious when they are scaled too small. simply Scale them bigger and watch it from a closer distance, it looks better. Of course, they should be seamless. A litte hint: somewhere in the code archives is an excellent(!) source that will automaticly make a texture seamless too, written by elias_t.
http://www2.arnes.si/~sopjsimo/gimp/stable.html
You first need to install the GTK+2 Package then install the Gimp Package. Both can be found on the page.
As for the tiling textures I have to say that tiles are oftenly obvious when they are scaled too small. simply Scale them bigger and watch it from a closer distance, it looks better. Of course, they should be seamless. A litte hint: somewhere in the code archives is an excellent(!) source that will automaticly make a texture seamless too, written by elias_t.