Dear photoshop humans or robots,
So, I do a variety of different things on photoshop, but one is illustration, so I wanted to suggest a feature:
Right now, smoothing is a line-weight stabilization feature, but it's dumb. I mean that in an illustration sense. It's hard to understand if you don't do inking.
Inking line art is meant to describe or add line quality to light and dark areas (the line gets thinner when it touches a brighter area, and thicker when it touches a darker area). Can't you just press the stylus harder and lighter to do this? Yes and no. Yes you can, but the size is determined by a specific and arbitrary limit. So, what if it had no limit?
What if you made the ability to adjust the brush size as you put a brush stroke on the canvas a simultanoues and independent process? As you move the brush across the canvas, the artist has the ability to enlarge or shrink the brush using a shortcut and their non-dominant hand. I'm not saying remove smoothing altogether, but smoothing is an automated process; it doesn't think; it's not meant to. It's actually too similar to traditional processes where you would have a brush or a nib and how hard you press allows more pigment to flow, but...we're digital artists. We don't have to think like traditional artists. We don't need their limitations. If we change the ability to adjust brush size to a simultaneous process, we can do things that no other digital painting platform can--manually and instantaneously adjust line quality with complete accuracy precision. Thus, systematizing a manual process with the most specificity. That is what digital art should be.
Anyway, I just thought it was worth mentioning if it hadn't been. I've just been using this for a while and I do notice that a lot of the tools either favor graphic design processes or traditional art processes, but I think there is more we can do if we think strictly as digital artists first and don't absorb the traditional limitations.