Soft blending in photoshop

[Nemome]

Hey everbody!

Somehow I find it very difficult to do a soft smooth blending between colors or even grayscale values in photoshop.
For my last painting I even used the blur tool of " Paint Tool Sai " because I was unable to blend the tones soft together.

So:
1. How do you blend very soft in Photoshop?

2. What does the "flow" setting on a brush change? I really don't know for what "flow" is...

Normally I work in Photoshop with a hard round brush, opacity set to pen pressure if I am not mistaken.
Then I slowly lighte. the pressure while going into the second tone I want to have blend. Then I colorpick some midtones I created eith the pen pressure and redo redo redo this process.
But still it looks like some stairs artefacts. It doesn't look very smooth.

I don't want to use Sai's blur tool everytime I want to smoothly blend tones together.

Any help would be appreciate.

Sil

[vardoburrito]

In addition to using pressure to control opacity, lowering the opacity value on the brush tool helps when blending. Soften the brush tip also. shift+'['
Right now, I blend with a rake tipped brush, but of course experiment and see what you like and what feels it produces.

And after all these years, I don't even know what Flow is. o.0

[matejkovacic]

Lowering Flow instead of Opacity keeps brushes more natural, while they still haver texture in them. Lowering Opacity makes texture vanish.

http://conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=235823

[Nemome]

Thanks everybody.

Gonna give both a try and then report

[Nemome]

Tried different things out.
First, last and the airbrush one is okay.

Airbrush one is just damn difficult to use because you destroy the form of the object very fast because everything gets too soft.
I think a mix between these settings is the best.

Thanks for your help.

If there are any suggestions for soft smooth blending left, tell me!

Sil

[vardoburrito]

Render Queen Linda Bergkvist wrote a few articles on blending, but I can't seem to 'Google' a proper link to. If you got 'Google' skills, she's my reference. (:


Keep working on them perspectives, as will I.
Gnomon - Scott Robertson is my reference for values and perspectives (: