Smudge Tool

[Pntrguy]

Hi Affinity Forum! I’m a newbie to Affinity Photo and am trying to learn some of the nuances. Could someone please help me with a few questions on the smudge tool?

 

1) Can it be set to affect multiple layers at once? I’ve tried using it with two layers selected. But it’s super laggy and doesn’t really seem to achieve a blend from the two layers.

 

2) When smudging a single uniform color into the transparent areas of its layer, the smudge brush sometimes changes the color somewhat as it smears, adding darker shades of the color as it goes, and even throwing in some grey. Is there a setting to keep colors truer to their original hue as they get smudged?

 

3) This one is kinda weird. I like to set “F” as my shortcut key for the smudge brush. I don’t believe “F” is set as any other competing shortcut. Yet, for some reason, it just doesn’t want to choose the smudge tool when I hit “F.” Picking other keys for the smudge shortcut seems to work fine, but not “F.” Any ideas why this might be?

 

Maybe I should separate these as different forum questions. Just trying to learn this tool and running into some challenges.

 

Thanks!

[Lee D]

The Smudge tool, doesn't have an option to be used on multiple layers at once, even though multiple layers can see be selected.

I'm aware of an issue where the tool does reveal some transparency, this is logged with the devs. Can't seem to reproduce any colour changes after using the tool on a solid colour and using the colour picker. Do you have any examples of this?

You will need to make sure that you change or turn off the Toggle Frequency Layer shortcut under Miscellaneous the shortcut will then work.

 

[Pntrguy]

Thanks for the info Lee D! And turning off that TFL shortcut did the trick. The "F" shortcut works fine now.

Here are some examples of the color changing with use of the smudge tool. In the blue example (Test 2), "A" marks a sample of the original blue color at 100% opacity. The arrows indicate just a couple of the places where the blue went on to a darker shade while smudging. You can see other areas where this happened as well.

The multicolor example (Test 1) was made earlier, and I don't remember all of what I was doing there with the smudge tool. I think I was using it with multiple layers selected at once. In any event, you can see where, rather than getting a clean smudging of existing colors, the tool resulted in streaks of darkened variants of the original colors, as well as the addition of gray streaks. And gray wasn't among the original colors at all.

Hope this helps. And further insights are welcome. Thank you again!

[Zenoctra]

Hey I know this is SUPER late but in case you didn't figure it out, here it is. The color change is happening because your using the smudge tool with a textured brush. If you change to a basic soft brush for the smudge tool the color change should go away. (At least that fixed my issue)

[Pntrguy]

Thanks for the tip! I look forward to seeing if that makes a difference.

I also found that working in a particular file of mine, the smudge tool somehow functions perfectly, even with a brush that gives problems in other files. But then, by opening a brand new file and beginning work in there, the smudge tool issue rears its ugly head again. On the other hand, by duplicating the file that “works,” and using that “offspring” file as a new workspace, the smudge tool again works perfectly.

I have no idea what’s set differently in that one file that makes it a golden solution to this problem. Duplicating that file isn’t an ideal way to have to start a new project every time. But it’s been getting me by so far.