Affinity photo's equivalent of Krita's Blender blur?

[ClioStark]

Hi Everyone! I'm new to affinity photo and I was looking to use it as my primary digital painting software, except that at the moment I don't want to because of its lack of its Krita's equivalent of the Blender blur brush (see attached video for what it does), which I use for painting ambient occlusion and soft reflected light.

I tried using the smudge tool and I don't like the result. Sometimes it pulls out a random shade of color out of nowhere and when it does work properly, I don't quite like the result because it messes with the shape of the shadow or light I'm painting. A zero hardness brush doesn't quite do it because it's still a bit too hard edged for my liking and I'm not comfortable with using pen pressure-controlled opacity yet, and the paint mixer has a very limited use case in my workflow where it creates a satisfactory result.

But if you guys have a different workflow that achieves the same effect then I'll be glad to take them. I really wanna make the most out of Affinity photo because besides digital painting, I have limited use cases for raster editing software. Wouldn't wanna waste this great piece of software.

Edited January 25, 2021 by ClioStark

[firstdefence]

Affinity doesn't have blender brushes at the moment and trying to make another tool be something it was not designed to be will likely end in tears and frustration. I'd stick with Krita until you see blender brushes showcased in Affinity Photo.

[Move Along People]

-

[Medical Officer Bones]

I would stick with Krita for digital painting. At this point Affinity Photo is missing a number of options which hamper it as a digital painting tool, in particular when compared to Krita. For example, brush management is pretty far behind Krita, Brush control in Photo is light-years behind, a free transform tool is missing (and forget about Krita's really nice transformation tools), the GUI is counter-productive in my opinion (the right-mouse click widget in Krita is hard to beat), no proper canvas rotation unless working on a Mac (an absolute must), colour palette control and selection is not nearly as good,  and so on.

Which is understandable, since Krita focuses on being a best-in-class digital painting app, while Photo is meant to be a more general image editor. It scores better in that department compared. Photo is great as a compositor, though: use Krita for painting, and Photo for compositing work.

My opinion, of course. Photo misses too many features which I rely on in Krita.

 

[ClioStark]

After further consideration I decided to return my copy. Thanks for the replies everyone. After doing a lot of searching and through here I understand that AP is too lacking for digital painting at the moment. I do hope they add more digital painting features soon.