We present and compare five approaches for synthesizing and relighting real 3D surface textures. We adapted Efros's texture quilting method and combined it with five different relighting representations, comprising: a set of three photometric images; surface gradient and albedo maps; polynomial texture maps; and two eigen based representations using 3 and 6 base images. We used twelve real textures to perform quantitative tests on the relighting methods. We develop a systematic qualitative test for the assessment of the complete synthesis systems. Our conclusion is that the cheaper gradient and threebase-image eigen methods should be used in preference to the other methods, especially where the surfaces are Lambertian or near Lambertian.