If you've ever noticed, you would find out that some of the Desktop Pictures provided inside your Mac have relatively small size and dimension that can fill the whole of your widescreen. This is because those background images can be tiled when it's being set as Desktop Background.

In Leopard, you can find some examples of background images inside folder Mac HD (which is your hard drive name) ▸ Library ▸ Desktop Pictures. Ripples Blue.jpg is one of the small sized repeatable background images I'm talking about.

However, this kind of background images can be easily created. Let's see how you can do it.

Grab your Pattern

I've been Googling (verb. searching with Google) around the web and finally I find this site : Brusheezy which provides many kinds of brushes and patterns. You can grab your pattern there.

Alternative : Define your Color

Perhaps some of you don't like to use pattern as your Desktop Pictures. In this case, you can use solid color as alternative which I'll explain later how to create it efficiently.

Store your Pattern

After downloading and extracting your pattern, you will have file with extension .PAT (Adobe Photoshop Patterns File) which should be dropped inside Mac HD ▸ Applications ▸ Adobe Photoshop ▸ Presets ▸ Patterns.

Photoshop : Stamp your Pattern

Now, open your Photoshop and load the patterns by opening .PAT files. You will see your several new patterns.

Put your cursor on top of one of the patterns. You will see the dimension of the pattern pop up not long after that.

Create a new photoshop canvas (Command-N) and set the canvas size the same as the dimension shown by the description before; Don't forget to use transparent as your initial background contents.

Choose your Photoshop tool : Pattern Stamp Tool which can be used to stamp out your selected pattern to Photoshop canvas (Hint : Selecting large size of brush will be a great help).

Filling your canvas by stamping around with your mouse until you get your pattern done then save it to Mac HD ▸ Library ▸ Desktop Pictures ▸ Patterns (creating new folder here, Patterns).

Tips : You can also select all your canvas (Command-A) and Fill it with selected Pattern.

Solid Color as Desktop Background

As promised before, you can easily create tiny size background image for solid color. Create a new photoshop document with dimension 1x1 pixels. Fill it with your desirable color, e.g. Black, and then save it to Patterns folder which was created just now. Finally, you get your background images.