Making photoshop blenders and crisp line brushes?

[lukey120292]

Just downloaded the trial for photoshop CS 4. i normally work in painter but heard some good things about photoshop and would like to take advantage off both off them. In painter it's pretty simple to start because you have lots of brushes laid out for you, not just for painting and applying colour, but for blending. Could anybody tell me the most effective way to make blenders in photoshop? similair to the 'just add water' blender on corel painter, for blending smooth colours in? And does anybody know how i can make some kind of extremely sharp brush so i can make crisp clean lines?

Cheers,

Luke.

[Datameister]

Well, most people work a bit differently in Photoshop than in Painter - I think you'll find that while it's possible to mimic Painter's blending brushes to a certain extent in Photoshop, most artists prefer to take advantage of the program's own unique strengths.

Many people like to blend simply by using a basic hard round brush at a low opacity. Keep sampling colors from the canvas and painting then gently into each other until you get a not-quite-perfectly-smooth blend. This is demonstrated in the "Digital Painting in PS" threads.

However, you can mimic "just add water" fairly well using the smudge tool in Photoshop. The trick is to go into the brush options and activate scattering. You'll have to play with the settings a lot, but I think you'll find that the results are quite good. You can also use other brush tips with the smudge tool, but usually you'll want some amount of scattering. That prevents the ugly smearing effect of the smudge tool's default settings. Stuff like "grainy water" is harder to mimic in Photoshop, but you can certainly get textures like that with the brush tool.

EDIT: As for crisp lines, just stick with the basic hard round brush at a small size. That's about as crisp as it gets. For extra sharpness, do it on a new layer and then use the unsharp mask filter on that layer.

[lukey120292]

Thankyou! that has helped alot!

[Datameister]

Absolutely! Oh, and also, as far as crisp lines go, you can try using the lasso tools as well. They produce very sharp edges.