Paper Tiles

My current paper image sucks as a texture tile. Need to turn it into a tile in Photoshop.

This is my current image taken from a nice deep tooth watercolour paper.

As you can see I have a gradient here which makes it fail quite nicely as a tile. I checked a bunch of videos online and this one from Flow Graphics covers it nicely.

The real key of this video is to make a square from a nice clean section on the image. offset by half the image and then tidy up the seems in the middle.

However this tile does not work out well at all either. Another image is needed. Lit better this time with less of a gradient.

However with a little you tube help from AstroBackyard I can remove the gradient and leave just the tooth of the paper.

This image of just the tooth should give me a great normal map.

Offsetting the square I produced 2 tiles to try as normal maps

These textures as normal map do work but the desired effect is not achieved.

OK.... lets keep going