In texture analysis, the Gibbs sampler constitutes an important tool in the generation of synthetic textures. The textures are modeled as distributions with specified parameters. In this paper, we study the estimation process of the parameters in such distributions and compare Besags coding method with a pseudo-likelihood method. We also compare simulated annealing with the Newton-Raphson method to find the global maximum of a likelihood or pseudo-likelihood function. For some textures, the two methods differ but in most case there are no important differences between them. The two maximization methods find the same maximum, but the Newton-Raphson method is much faster. However, the Newton-Raphson method cannot be applied in some cases when the location of the maximum differs too much from the starting points. Here, it is often possible to find the global maximum using simulated annealing. The methods have been used in an application with newsprint.