Mixer brush problems for photo editing

[DBWL]

I am considering switching from all adobe to affinity photo, tried my standard editing workflow and ran into the first massive problem. The workflow I use is quite common for photographers of any level of professionalism, frequency separation and then going about the low frequency layer with the mixer brush. The process uses the mixer brush to smoothen out the skin colors and brightness to get a more even overall look, or sometimes also to minimize wrinkles (skin or somewhere else).

First of all, there still seems to be a bug when using 100% strength (already mentioned one year ago in this forum post)

 

That said, the tool seems to be not working for this task which unfortunately breaks the whole program for me. I came over some problems like the "autoclean" after each stroke but that didn't help further. The adjustment of the mixer brush is far to coarse and the effects seem to be not linear, PS uses more values to adjust the tool further. The transitions look awful, either you get an unnoticeable ultra short transition (looks more like edge blurring) or very long but over pronounced first color, creating a smooth and nice transition wasn't quite possible. It looks more like the "paint" is very viscous and doesn't mix well, you get a lot of streaks of colors when mixing two patches, which is probably more realistic but not usable for what I do.

Another strange behavior I noticed was that colors creates some kind of "color artifacts" on the edges of the stroke. I experimented a bit with just patches of the same color with different luminescence values, I should therefore just see those two colors and their in between luminescence values, but somehow there was another (more red) tone created in between.

 

Don't get me wrong, the program seems to do many things well, but there aren't too many tasks I need to go into an external Image editor, like Photoshop or Affinity, to accomplish. This being a quite common use case for me breaks it.

Maybe I am doing something wrong (hope so) any someone can enlighten me.
Luckily started a 30 day trial before buying.

 

Edited March 19, 2023 by DBWL
Minor edits and erros

[Old Bruce]

5 hours ago, DBWL said:

then going about the low frequency layer with the mixer brush.

While I myself don't do this sort of work I have to ask if you have ever tried the Smudge brush or one of the Blur tools?

[DBWL]

Yes I tried that. For lager areas the blur tool would maybe work but normally you need the stroke and also to "pull" color from one area to another (for example to lighten up an area). It might be possible to do some of this with the dodge/burn tools but this doesn't solve the color mixing/evening problem.

[iconoclast]

Hi!

I'm not sure if I understand what you want to do, but what about the Smudge Brush Tool? It will blend colors into each other. But it will also distort details. So I'm not sure if this may be useful for you.

[Old Bruce]

41 minutes ago, iconoclast said:

what about the Smudge Brush Tool?

 

1 hour ago, Old Bruce said:

ask if you have ever tried the Smudge brush

 

[DBWL]

I should have specified in my first answer that I tried both methods, like iconoclast said, smudge does "move"/distort the color more but doesn't mix as well. The two tools are a lot more similar in Affinity than in PS. Unfortunately both not usable for my use case.

[Lee D]

The Mixer Brush is getting some changes in our next update (2.1) which is currently in beta. You can always post in the Feedback section any improvements you'd like to see made to the tool in future updates.

[DBWL]

33 minutes ago, Lee D said:

The Mixer Brush is getting some changes in our next update (2.1) which is currently in beta. You can always post in the Feedback section any improvements you'd like to see made to the tool in future updates.

thank you very much for the info, so I will need to retest that. I guess the update will still take some time to roll out and until then my 30 day trial is most likely gone. Is there a way to get another one to test such things?