Smooth blending or blur

How should I approach creating a blended blur effect? It seems that whatever tool I select, when I choose the blend mode, or blend tool, the effect chooses a single semi-averaged color and fills the whole brush area with it.

The effect is prominent when trying to blend a hard color edge against white with the Soft blend tool. Approaching the edge causes color to fill into the white space leaving a white strip between the blended color and the main color that I was trying to soften. When trying to blend two hard edges of color the blend tool produces a third averaged color stripe instead of a softening between the colors.

Any suggestions for how to achieve blending like I am looking for?

Hi,

Attaching screenshots might help the support team to offer you a proper solution I guess.

This is an example of what I am discussing. Rebelle is the image on the left, and a Krita blender is on the right. All strokes are top down. For Rebelle, the top two strokes are Blend - Soft and the bottom is Blend - Soft2. You'll note on the top right of the Rebelle image, the Soft blender is just touching the blue but it is averaging that color over the whole blender instead of softening the blue edge by a little. That gives the white edge line between the blue blur and the main blue color without actually blending the blue shape.  It is the same effect as if I chose a light blue color and painted with the Pencil - Soft Round.

All of these blends are made with a single stroke. I did not scrub with the Krita tool to make that effect. The resulting issue is when I try to blend edges in Rebelle with either the blender or the various paint tool's blend mode, I end up having to scrub to eliminate banding because the tool isn't localizing the color pickup and instead produces a single color blend of all the colors.

Personally, I prefer Rebelle's blend tool compared to those found in other programs. I've always felt that how the blend tool works in those programs make the smudged areas more noticeable than if I were to just leave it alone. Rather than using the blend tool, I "blend" by layering strokes. If I mess up, Rebelle's blend tool does a fairly good job of making it look more like an actual brush stroke instead of a smudged boundary.

Just my two cents.

Seems like you are refering to something like this issue, a very interesting watch.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf6FEp8vIeQ

Yes, exactly that. The upper right stroke shows a color averaging that doesn't match the the tool's alpha channel intensity.

The video illustrates the various incarnations of it. Thank you for posting.

Yeah this problem is very common in a lot of softwares, ClipStudio, Rebelle, PaintStorm, SketchBook all have this issue.

Dont tested photoshop i dont have it.

Krita is the only one who have a proper solution.

jonnywiseman posted a very good video about the problem.

This video continues about the issue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlR2DmDQbgY

@Marcelo1982, I'll check out that video too.

I agree that it is common, but it hasn't been as noticeable with other apps for me. I checked how Paintstorm handled it just now, and with the default set of brushes. The simple blender does the full color but it is dynamic during the stroke, so it seems to hide it better. The soft blender does not appear to exhibit it to me and softens similar to the krita example with localized blending. ClipStudio wasn't great.

So, my vote would be to have some attention given to allow a better blending slider that maybe controls the blend radius, alpha channel averaging, or color pickup. I'm sure there are some like @amade that like the current behavior. I just find the combination of the color averages without dynamic calculation makes blending more difficult than I expect.

Thanks for the video links.

I totally agree that it would be great if the team looked into this.

I watched the video before I even realised it was a problem for me and then understood more about how blending works and how it was effecting my workflow.

Because the paint colour appears to jump across a edge when you just touch it between two colours and contaminate it, then I wind up trying to blend the unwanted colour into the paint messing with my previous stokes and get often end up with a unstatisfactory colour blend.

I suppose I was working with it but now its clear it would be so much better to have something like the blending radius that Krita has.

I also vote for a way to correct spelling and typos, lol.