Building a seamless texture

I thought I'd take one of the images I found on pintrest and make it tile.

Creating great looking seamless textures is no easy matter.

original

step 1: remove dark & red patches

I have to be very careful to not lose any of the wonderful detail of this texture. 

If you aren't careful, cloning can quickly destroy a texture.

I want to minimal adjustments to the image to get it to tile nicely

step 2 : even out color and remove more red/dark patches

If I want this thing to tile I needed to remove the yellow and red patches.
I create copies of the image and flip them vertically & horizontally to create more variation.
I am always cloning 100% hard. Soft edges can also ruin a texture.

That last adjustment make the image too noisy.
I will need to remove some of the bumps and ridges

Step 3 : rework to remove noise

I chose a square portion of this texture, used the offset filter and went to

work on making it seamless.

final texture

texture in UE4

tile example

As you can see, there is still room for improvement.
Even though the seams are gone, the pattern of repetition is too obvious.

 final tile texture

final tile texture example

I think I removed enough repetitious elements to make the tile look better.