The Art of Blending?

[Shrew11]

Can anybody help me out?
I need to know how exactly does
one blend? The only way I can figure it out
is to either:
1. Smudge so the colors eventually go together (don't really like the way it turns out though, kinda blurry and soft)
2. Go from each shade of the color your using(Ex: Bright red, all the way to Dark red).

My blending methods just don't seem to be the right path.
Any techniques that you guys know that can help?
Much appreciated,
Thanks.

[seraphtide]

The way I normally blend is by using the opacity slider and fading between the colors. For example, if I have a red area and a blue area, I'll overlay some blue at about 20% opacity on the red. I continue like that until I have a rough gradient. then I sample some of the middle colors that I have created (in this example the bluish-red I've made) and then use that at a low opacity (around 20%). If you continue doing this, you'll get a nice smooth gradient.

[Elwell]

Lower opacity, paint, sample, repeat is the standard method. You can also play around with the healing brush.

[Idiot Apathy]

I can't stand manual opacity.
Here's what I do, under your brush settings>other settings set up your brushes with either/both opacity and flow to pen pressure. I find this is a much more natural way to paint and blend - all in the same stroke. You will, as Elwell said - need to paint, sample and repeat to "mix" the paint you need; but there is no (aesthetically pleasing) way around that.

[latimer]

What I do is go to brush options & set "wet edges". I then set opacity to about 70%. then "paint, sample, repeat."

[Shrew11]

Ok, well I am a definite noob at this.
What exactly is a paint sample?

Thank you soo much for the replies.

[nofingers]

This was posted by corza334 in the "Digital painting in PS 2" thread in this sub forum, this is how most of us blend I'm guessing. Use the eyedropper tool to pick the inbetween colors, use the Alt key as a shortcut while using the brush tool, and basically just keep going back and forth with low opacity to you get the desired smoothness. If you have a drawing tablet, then I recommend setting the opacity jitter to pen pressure
And, Im not sure if this is right.. But this is how i blend, Works for me anyway.

1)-http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v631/corza334/step1.jpg 2)-http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v631/corza334/step2.jpg
3)- http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v631/corza334/step3.jpg 4) -http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v631/corza334/step4.jpg

[Pedes]

There's simple tutorial on Tasha's side:
http://www.tascha.ch/content/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=45&Itemid=72