From the course: Drawing and Painting in Photoshop

Smudge, Blur, and Sharpen tools - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Drawing and Painting in Photoshop

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Smudge, Blur, and Sharpen tools

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- [Instructor] We've learned a lot about tools that are used to apply color to the digital canvas. Now it's time to take a look at some tools and techniques that are not used to apply color but to manipulate the color that is already on our digital canvas. Over here in the tool bar, we find this smudge finger icon here and if you click and hold it, we also find two more tools, the smudge tool, the sharpen tool, and the blur tool. And we want to have a look at each one of these tools, and we start with the smudge tool. With the smudge tool we can smudge the color that is on the canvas. As you can see here, no new color is applied. We just smudge the color that is here. And, with a textured brush tip like I'm using it here, we can achieve a nice, bristly look of this smudging. And if we smudge into vertical and horizontal directions, we can really soften up these edges. The smudge tool is very handy to achieve painterly effects, even if we have painted with a hard-edged brush, the smudge tool is a wonderful tool to soften up these edges and make everything look a little bit more loose and painterly. There's one specific thing that I want to talk about. We have the brush settings open here on the side and as you can see, spacing is activated. This is the normal behavior of the smudge tool. If you de-activate spacing, the smudge tool starts to behave very different. Now, the different brush tips here work more like a dry brush, picking up the color and ripping it off the digital canvas and smudging it with these distinctive steps between the different brush tips. If we add some angle jitter to our brush, this effect looks less repetitive and now the smudge tool almost looks like pastel chalk. So if you're ever looking for this kind of effect, keep in mind that in the brush settings you have to deactivate the spacing in the smudge tool. Now there are the two other tools, the blur tool-- I have to increase the size quite a bit. Now the blur tool also softens edges but the effect is much more subtle. Even if you really press hard and work at 100% strength like I'm doing it here, the blur tool will only have a very subtle effect. It is not particularly useful for painting, but I think in photo retouch, this subtle blur is an effect that you can use from time to time. And the same is basically true for the third tool, the sharpen tool. Also, here I have to increase the size a little bit, the strength, let's increase it to 100%. And now, when I work over these edges here, you see that the contrast on the edge is increased, everything gets darker and crisper but we also get these color distortions here around our edges. That is very characteristic of the sharpen tool and the effect is not very pleasing. The sharpen tool is not a tool that a digital painter or illustrator will use often. It's, like the blur tool, more a tool for photo retouch. So, bringing the color onto the canvas is just the first step. Once it's there, we still have many options to tweak and adjust our marks and brush strokes.

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