Smudges

Smudge is the artist's term for blending two or more colors. In Photoshop, there are, naturally, several ways of smudging . There are several ways of doing virtually anything in Photoshop. Be that as it may, using the Smudge tool is the most obvious and the quickest way to blend something into its background.

Using the Smudge Tool

The Smudge tool looks like, and works like, a finger. It's in the same toolbox compartment with the Blur and Sharpen tools. The Smudge tool picks up color from wherever you start to drag it and moves it in the direction in which you drag. Honestly, nothing could be much simpler. You do, however, have to use the Tool Options bar's Strength field to set the pressure of your smudging finger. At 100%, the finger simply wipes away the paint. At 50%, it smears it. At 25%, the smear is less pronounced. Figure 9.1 shows these different smear settings. Photoshop considers the Smudge tool to be a brush, so you can set the width of the finger by choosing an appropriate brush size from the Brush menu.

Figure 9.1. Smudges at different Strength settings.

You can also use the Smudge tool to mimic finger painting. This option starts each stroke with the foreground color. You'll find it quite handy if you need to blend some color into an existing picture, perhaps to hide something that's part of the original photo that you'd rather do without. Figure 9.2 shows an example of finger painting. This is a picture I'm quite fond of. Mom and kid were adopting a cat from the SPCA, and you can see them falling in love. But someone gave that cat a really odd name , which shows up in the cage card behind the boy's shoulder.

Figure 9.2. The Smudge tool can help change the cat's name, and blurring the letters makes it less obvious.

Setting Smudge Options

Strength and finger-painting options and blending modes are set in the Tool Options bar, shown in Figure 9.3. Click and hold the arrow next to the Strength setting to access the setting slider, and drag the slider to set the strength. If you'd rather not access the slider, type a single digit to set it to a multiple of 10. For instance, type 4 to set to 40. (That trick works with all of Photoshop's sliders, as long as there's only one relevant slider visible at a time.) If you like that shortcut but want more precise control, simply type the digits of the measurement you desire in quick succession.

Figure 9.3. The Smudge Tool Options bar.

Check Finger Painting if you want to use the Smudge tool to add some smudged color as you drag. Otherwise, leave the check box empty.

The blending modes are on a pop-up menu. This tool doesn't give you all the blending mode options you learned about in the previous hour , but you can chooseaside from NormalDarken, Lighten, Hue, Saturation, Color, or Luminosity. Of these, Darken and Lighten are obviously the most useful. The Darken and Lighten modes affect only pixels that are lighter or darker, respectively, than the beginning color. The Darken mode changes lighter pixels and the Lighten mode affects darker pixels.

Which Smudge Is Best?

If the Smudge tool doesn't achieve the effect you intended, there's also a Smudge Stick filter, which you'll learn about in Hour 15, "Filters to Make Your Picture Artistic." Filters , in case you haven't encountered the term before, are tools that apply special effects to your picture. Photoshop has over 100 filters. Each filter applies a different effect to the image, ranging from a blurring or sharpening filter to one that adds clouds to a sky, lights to a backdrop, or turns the image into a Japanese brush painting. You can adjust most of them, and you can fade them so they have less effect.