Seamless brick texture progress

This week one of the tasks I was set for this module was to make a seamless brick texture including normal and specular maps. My first task was to find a good image of some bricks to work from. I ended up picking this image because I thought it was a good image despite the white markings on it which would be obvious if tiled.

I then rotated the image, cropped it in the best place in a square shape and used the offset filter making the texture split into 4 so that I could make sure it was completely tile-able. 

From there I used the clone stamp tool along with low opacity black and grey brushes to make the whole texture tile-able. This mean making sure all the cracks had a more similar colour, creating new bricks with the clone stamp and ensuring there was a similar shade of brick throughout so that it would seem natural. 

I then went over the cracks with a mid grey brush on a new layer which I then converted to a multiply, darkening the cracks and increasing the contrast which would make the bricks stick out more on the final texture.

I then added a small surface blur to the image. This was so that I could use a height to normal map filter in Xnormals to make a basic normal map from it. I had a little trouble getting this right as some of the white specks on the bricks were staying very prominent on the normal map. 

This is the normal map I ended up with. It's still very noisey and I think that I may likely redo it yet it worked out anyway. 

I then duplicated the layer, applied a small gausian filter to the layer and set it to overlay. After this I made many copies of it to increase the strength of the map. This highlights the problematic noise even more though, hence why I will probably redo it. I need to normalize the map in this state however I cannot get the right filters on my computer at home and so I will have to wait until next week to go into the computer labs to completely finish this step.

Below is the specular map I made from the diffuse map. I think this has came out well and will look good on the final result. I don't know whether I chose the greatest original texture for this task but I will update this post as I go. 

UPDATE

Below you can see my updated normals and blurred image that helped produce them. I decided to blur the image a lot more this time until you couldn't really see much detail at all apart from the difference between the bricks and the cracks between them. This came out a lot better on my normals. 

This is my base normal map to work from. It is a lot cleaner than my original. I think this map will work really nicely and look forward to being able to finish the project next week. 

My layered normal map doesn't look pretty but does look quite a bit like my lecturers example map which I figure must be a good thing. All in all I feel more confident about this map.