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Hi, I am using both AP desktop and iPad versions and IMO both lack any workable paint blending tool. The smudge comes close to being a functional tool but as you can see in the inserted image, after using a default simple round soft brush to apply two color strips and attempting to get a nice blend, there appears an edge, Ie wet edge, which is not what I want. ( The smudge tool has all the default settings running with wet edges not set) see first insert. The paint mix brush is frustrating to use and is really a joke! I first saw this paint mixer brush technology in Photoshop CS6. The paint mixer brush was the long awaited solution from Adobe to satisfy the decade long request from all the digital painters who wanted a blending brush/tool that actually worked. Well , IMO this offering from Adobe failed miserably. So complicated to use and did not offer a simple blending solution. I really don't know of anyone who actually uses the paint mixer brush. I was sad to see that Affinity Photo borrowed the Paint mixer idea from Adobe and IMO , this paint mixer brush has to be tweaked to the N th degree for little results... Not worth the effort... it is a joke to use. Now, the app Procreate offers a simple yet very effective and fun to use smudge tool that does exactly what one would expect a blending brush would do... ie... simply blend colors! Conclusion: Affinity photo please give us a useful blending tool.,, perhaps rewriting the present smudge tool to function more effectively... like the Procreate smudge tool. Thanks

Okay, a preamble before I tell you what I have found. I use blending a lot in my artwork and what I previously found is that the AP smudge tool does a relatively OK job on large areas of blending but doesn't do well on any blending with a brush size smaller that 75-08 pixels. ( which I need) After receiving a response back to my forum posting about getting a better AP blending tool, I revisited AP and its smudge tool with the hope of uncovering something I missed. What I found holding back the performance of the smudge tool was the type of brush it was set to. Any brush setting with a texture or/and grain produced an OK blend for large areas but fell short of anything acceptable for smaller blend areas , if the smudge brush was less than 75 pixels. The solution, I found, was to make sure that the smudge tool was using a brush that had no built in texture or grain.. ie. use the basic set of brushes. For the IPAD version of AP: I found that the Basic> large Round Brush works the best For the Desktop version of AP: I found that the Basic> Round light brush works best. Of course you have to you have to play with width, flow and strength settings. So there you have it.. Buried within the AP toolset is a wonderful Blender for digital painting! Now the smudge tool works perfectly and can stand next to Procreate's blender. The first image is something I did in AP on the Ipad, with the basic >large round brush as the blending tool. ( okay, I got carried away by the fun of using my newly found AP blender) The second image done on the Mac desktop using the AP round light brushes. If there is enough interest in seeing this blending technique in action, I could create a video of the process. Enjoy! Gregory Clarke-Johnsen