Using Photos as Patterns in CS4

[jmw]

Painter has the great feature of letting you use photos as paper textures. It's easy and works great. If I have a photo of a pile of rocks, I set it as a paper texture and my brush basically 'paints' the photo. I tend to build up layers and work with it to achieve a really interesting texture. I want to be able to do this in Photoshop. The closest thing Photoshop has to the paper texture feature I've found is the Texture tab in the brush creator. However, you can't use a photo as a pattern, it has to be the special photoshop pattern file. I installed the Pattern Maker plugin to see if I could use it to make some of my own photo patterns, but it completely slices up the photo and makes a giant mish-mash of it. I want the photo to stay untouched but simply repeat in tiles as I paint. How can I do this? Any help is greatly appreciated.

[jmw]

Okay, I apparently thought too hard about this and looked right past the obvious. All you have to do is make a selection and hit Edit>Define Pattern. This does pretty much what I wanted. It still isn't exactly like Painter, patterns still have to be applied to a brush using a blending mode, but I can live with this.