Heronheart. Thanks I'll try that. meantime I found a solution to the repeating part in corel and I think it supports the seamless tile too. Corel supports the bitmap tile as part of the fill function. so it's no longer time critical, but it would still be nice to be able to manipulate photoshop a little better. I suspect that you are right that I'm just not doing the right things to make "define pattern" show up. I'll commit your post to notepad and try it later this eve. - Thank you for your efforts