How to blend effectively without opacity set to pressure?

technokill

Hi guys!

I've been focusing my practice on blending lately. I've always used the brush set to pressure on both FLOW and OPACITY. However I always hated that opacity difference as I do my strokes. (Im a beginner btw). So I ended up turning off pressure for opacity, leaving it just for flow.

Now the issue is I cant blend like I used to! What should I do to make a nice blending workflow without having to activate pressure for opacity every single time?

I could think of a couple things, but I'd like your opinion on this one:

- Change opacity with 0-9 buttons only when I want to blend (best option apparently)
- Make a brush just for blending (which doesnt seem so efficient)
- Learn how to work properly with opacity set to pressure (Not sure if that's even the matter)
???

Thank you ppl!

JedTheKrampus

I find it a lot quicker to get a really smooth blend in Krita because of its color-smudge and filter brushes. You should give it a try.

http://krita.org/download

To get to the brush settings, click the button in the toolbar.

It sounds inconvenient, but it's not. Click "Color Smudge Brush" on the left, and go back to your canvas where you have something to blend:

Or, you can test the brush out on that empty white space to the right of the brush settings. Once you're back to your canvas, if you want to blend across both regions of color, you should make two strokes with a big color smudge brush, both with medium-light pressure. (You can adjust brush size with [] just like in Photoshop, or if you use Shift+click you can drag the brush to the exact size you want.) The color smudge brush works by painting color when you press hard, and by smudging the underlying color when you press soft. It's like Sketchbook Pro on speed. Anyway, you should pick the color from one side (Krita uses Ctrl+click for this), and paint the color from one side to the other. Then do the same thing with the color from the other side. This gives you a lot of colors between those two to choose from while you're blending.

You can proceed as usual from here. Pick a color and use light to medium strokes to paint the gradient. This is where I was in about twenty seconds:

From here, if you want to make your blend even more disgustingly smooth, pick the filter brush and set the filter to Gaussian blur. The filter brush lets you apply a filter to just part of your image with a simple brushstroke.

This is my final result after using the Gaussian blur filter brush set to 50 by 50 pixels blur. If I didn't take the time to take screenshots and save them out, it would have taken me about a minute to blend this region, maybe a little less.

uncle

You can experiment with mixer brush.

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/understanding-adobe-photoshop-cs6/eyedropper-tool/

And here's another trick.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqLpnRLJbKw"]Photoshop Blending Brush - YouTube[/ame]

cw

Use photoshop smudge tool with spacing tickbox turned off.

technokill

Thanks for the info guys! I'll try them all!

Now Jed, your detailed guide is impressive, but I can't seems to let photoshop go. Ive tried manga studio, paint tool sai, corel painter. No matter what I keep coming back to photoshop.