Photoshop question: Can you paint with a texture? Or is clone stamp the only way?

[swiss]

When I open my brush tool, I can pick a specific color and paint with it. Is there any way to paint with a texture instead?

The problem with clone stamp is if the texture picture is small, you quickly run out of space when you're clone stamping and have to reset the starting point. Even if the texture is seamless and you stack them together, it'll come out looking like a pattern. Wondering if photoshop has any magic feature that gets around this.

[Mouse]

Hi Swiss

Does PS have layer masks and an ability to fill an entire layer with a seamless texture?

Reason I ask is because I texture paint in GIMP using layer masks (examples here and here), but I don't know if the technique can be translated to PS or not till I know if you have layer masks and texture fill tools.

[waldronate]

You should be able to define a pattern and use that as the fill on a brush. See https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...ead.php?t=5240 for more inspiration.

[swiss]

Mouse - yes I think so and I think that's what I did. Right now that's the closet I can get to what I'm looking for actually because...

Wald - I checked out that tut but it looks like it's a versioning issue. They're using an old version of full PS and I'm using a newer version of PS elements. I can define the pattern, but I can't find anywhere in the brush settings to paint with said pattern.

[Mouse]

There may be a better way of doing this in PS, but in GIMP I fill an entire layer with a seamless pattern, then add a layer mask at total transparency (black), and paint on the mask (not the texture) with white and reveal the texture.

Its more a case of painting bits of the texture visible wherever you want the texture on that layer to appear.

You need a full layer for every texture you wish to paint, and a full layer for different colour variations of the same texture (an example would be two identical grass layers, one lush for right next to the river, and one more browny greyish yellow for further away).

Doing it the way I describe also means that the textures appear on the map in the set order of the layers - eg if you have a sand texture layer for the beach around an island and a rock layer above that for the cliffs, followed by a grass layer for the island itself, you will need a second sand layer above all of those to make sandy paths across the island, because its simpler to use a second layer than faff around painting the paths transparent again through both the rock and the grass layers.

To get around the redundancy of a seamless texture (that's the pattern thing you were talking about I think), you need to use decent sized textures to begin with. The native textures in GIMP are pretty poor, many of them not being much bigger than a postage stamp. I had to create my own patterns in GIMP using seamless textures that I made that were up to 3000 px square.

[waldronate]

Does https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop-el.../patterns.html help any? I haven't used Photoshop Elements extensively since about version 2.0, which was a very long time ago. I have one only a few years old on a netbook-type thing around here somewhere, but I don't know which one it's on.