Coming from krita, I'm having a ton of issues with getting a decent versatile brush for painting and blending. I just want a brush that drops paint, runs out, and then blends softly and I just can't seem to make this happen no matter what combination of settings I use with the mixer brushes, regular brushes, smear brushes, blur brushes etc.
First of all, brush selection is a nightmare. I can select a method, say mixer brush. When I choose brushes from the selection menu, there are brushes specific to the method being used. Some have icons, some (correct me if I'm wrong) don't. When I'm choosing a brush, I don't know if I'm just choosing the tip, specific jitter configurations, size, shape, method, or any combination of all of these settings. Some brush configurations in smear brush mode may work in that mode, some may be specific and override that method of painting, changing it to another.
Second of all, mixer brush settings like load, mix, wetness, and flow all have unpredictable behavior. Not only that, but I have no idea what takes precedence if you are using these settings as a jitter set to your pen pressure. Whatever your load setting may be, your brush may or may not run out of paint... I don't get the mechanics of this. And if it does run out (as it is supposed to do), it is unpredictable and the variance is ridiculous. Like for instance, if I have 1% load, can take roughly two canvas lengths of a stroke to run out. The cleaning is just... I don't even know whats going on there. I painted on a transparent layer with mixer brush completely out of paint, and its giving me cloudy translucent strokes of a random colors, but not always... sometimes it will behave as expected and not paint anything as a clean brush with no paint should. Blending in this mode is atrocious... about the only kind of blending I can get is big thick wet strokes of the paint with subtle sharp lines of the paint I'm mixing with. The opacity jitter on this mode is disabled. Why?
Jitters in general are just confusing. You have a mininum setting for most jitters... but no maximum? The pen pressure to roundness jitter just doesn't even work for me... it is seemingly random on this setting. The pen tilt or angle setting goes between 3 sometimes 4 distinct roundness levels with no real smoothing between these shapes and it reacts really slowly to the tilt of the pen. There is no jitter setting for hardness or softness, nor is there a jitter for opacity... and the only tip shapes that allow you to adjust this setting (via menu/shortcut only) is the default round brush.
The smear brush is almost as close as I can get to my goal... the only problem being that the way you get that first dollop of your foreground color added into the equation is by checking the "Finger Painting" checkbox. Thats all you get for this setting... a single checkbox. There is no way that I can find to adjust the intensity, the opacity, the length of this stroke, etc. And to make matters worse, these things all seem to be randomized. I used this setting, selected a foreground color of black, and tried varying the pressure of my pen strokes and I can safely say there is no correlation between the intensity of the foreground color stroke and the pen pressure. Light strokes could produce almost opaque blackness, and the heaviest pressure could produce very little blackness... it was totally random, totally uncontrollable, and very unpredictable.
There is no doubt people are creating beautiful things with photoshop. The more I use this version, the more I believe they are probably using legacy versions with specialized brushes they've grown and adapted to over years of developing their workflow. My workflow with photoshop is nonexistent. After a couple of weeks and a few mediocre and compromised attempts to create art, I just can't find the right settings for a brush. Any suggestions?
AdChoices