affinity photo Discovering a Great Blending Tool in AP

[Gregory-CJ]

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

 

[gdenby]

Thanks for the post. I will have to try that. Always good to have another bit of finesse.

[Gregory-CJ]

4 hours ago, gdenby said:

Thanks for the post. I will have to try that. Always good to have another bit of finesse.

Good luck with that,, it works like a charm for me!

[Ninjag-O-G]

That's really helpful, thank you!

[Gregory-CJ]

Glad that this info is helpful  WatcherMagic!

 

[SrPx]

Yup, I can confirm that using no texture, tested quite some time ago, just well configured basic brushes is way better for performance ( I use it for regular painting...and I blend as I paint)

Anyway, that's what I use to paint with any software... I'm usually served just with a good old flow setting.

[Gregory-CJ]

SrPx:

Nice to have you  confirm this! 

It's  not evident  for anyone wanting a great blending tool (smudge >basic settings) when first getting into using AP.   From this post,, people can now find this info.