Smudge tool is painting instead of smudging

[Whispering_Glimmer9680]

Hi, 

I've been playing around with photoshop since I just got it. I was watching a video that talked about the smudge tool and they recommended using a noisy brush. So after playing with the default smudge brush I started going through the brush options to find one. I found one I liked, but it kept changing from the smudge tool to the brush tool.

I looked this up, and saw that if you control + alt + click the brush it selects it for the tool you are using regardless of the default setting. (So it would not automatically swap from smudge tool to the brush)

But the problem I'm having now is that my smudge tool doesn't smudge anymore, it basically selects whatever is under it when I click, and then it drags that around instead of blending anything together. This happens with any brush I try using.

You can see in the image below that instead of smudging or blending the two colors together, whenever I press down with my pen, it just grabs both colors and then acts as if that is the color of the brush. What's going on here and how can I fix this?

[Whispering_Glimmer9680 · Accepted solution]

I was able to get this figured out, when I switched my brush it changed the strength to 100%. Not knowing the effect of this I didn't bother to look. Lowering the strength fixed the issue for me.