i have this really big obsession with the smudge tool, it blends color very well in photoshop although steel doesnt recommend us to use it, well ive been playing around with it for 2 years and i dont know, for the whole time i was stucked with the 93% strength and i know something's not right, i want to know, some of the techniques with smudge if you are familiar with it, when to use lower pressure and when to use higher? thanks!

btw im really a newbie when it comes to painting :rofl:

Yeah i really dont like the smudge tool at all, but if you must use it then I would suggest playing with the brush types...try grunge or odd shaped brushes and play with the brush settings like opacity and see what you can do with it. I have seen the smudge tool make some pretty damed amazing clouds using this method, but it requires a great amount of control and skill, both of which I lack with that tool.

yep, i agree, it's a bad habit to fall into, blending is much, much smoother and more solid when done with low opacity strokes while painting, smudging together flattens out values badly, i use it for two purposes (neither of which i'm proud of but it's a large timesaver for me, i can do it the hard way, but, speed/time is against me most of the time) refining clouds, as chris said, and making a base to paint on from a rough speedpaint after blowing it up 400% (both of which are standard hard rounds, stylus set to opacity), but if it's done badly, it looks awful, does take some doing to make a smudged image look 'unsmudged', compare it to real life painting, a little smudging with your finger is different from trying to actually paint with your finger, used wisely it's a valuable tool, used unwisely it's a gimmick