Brush smoothing is another brilliant new feature and attribute we can assign to
our brushes now in Photoshop CC 2018. In this video I'm going to show you why it
is so important and how to utilize all its features. First of all when you
select a brush you can find the option up here called Smoothing. Now I reduce
this down to 0% for now just as a demonstration but every brush by default
is now set to 10% Smoothing it's good to know that it's already there by default
but by setting it to zero percent let me show you how it looks when I draw with
the mouse first of all so if I start drawing lines with this brush that's how
it looks with the mouse now I'm going to draw with the tablet something similar
so I'm using a Wacom tablet and obviously I can do much better with that
but now using the tablet steel but with an increase moving well you may be set
to around 60% let's see what I can do I can do much neater work doing these
curves and I can really control whether I want smaller or bigger and really plan
ahead how I want to do my twists and turns. So the best way I can describe
this feature is that it's almost like a steady hand drawing technique where as
if you are holding the pencil with two hands or maybe someone is guiding your
hand is probably a better metaphor for it because what is happening when you
have smoothing turned on is that your actual brush is slightly behind drawing
so it's delayed a bit and it's almost like you are pulling the brush around.
Now you might think that that is not a good thing but actually for this to make
it work well this delay really helps so let me show you what I mean I'm going to
set the percent back to zero and I'm going to just drew a line here so it's a
drawing I've done recently of Geralt from the Witcher series and let's say I
want to add the contouring nicely so that's like a rough sketch I need to
tidy this up so I'm going to go around it
and drew the lines now I'm not using any Smoothing now and you can see that I'm
doing quite a good job here but I get loads of little inaccuracies along the
way. Now if I increase the Smoothing up to let's say a hundred percent and then
I start drawing notice how my line is actually delayed behind the cursor but
then I can get to every detail and just really neatly refine them so if i zoom a
little closer you might see actually even better what I mean. So I have really
good control over which details I want to emphasize and which details I just
would like to keep nice and steady and smooth. Of course if I
reduce my brush size I can get in the inner parts as well and draw over these
details once again with that nice same precision maybe that's a little bit too
thin so I'm going to just increase my brush size slightly and just show you
that this is when I draw with Smoothing and I'm going to again turn off
Smoothing and try to draw this again you can see that even though I'm using the
tablet I will always have these bumps where I don't want them to show up so in
the past what I would have normally done is to use the Rotate tool, press R and
keep holding it to rotate on the keyboard and then it switches back to
the brush tool so you notice if I turn the whole canvas around it actually
helps me to draw better because I'm right-handed this is a more comfortable
direction for me to draw but I'm just going to press escape and demonstrate
that even in an uncomfortable angle with the smoothing on I can refine this line
and override what was the original line or if I want to I can follow the
original line much closer than without smoothing. Once again let's see this line
here so the original wobbly line is now replaced with a much neater
and more steady line same thing goes here I can nicely curve this line around
there and so on and so forth so you can imagine using this feature can really
help for a lot of different things in Photoshop so for decoration for
contouring and of course it doesn't stop that because we have additional options
so it's not just the tolerance value that you can change but you have
additional smoothing options like the Pulled String mode which is quite cool.
If I turn the Smoothing down a bit maybe around 10% and I turn that option on
I can show you what difference that makes. So with that being on I'm going to get
this radius and the drawing only starts where my cursor gets out of this radius.
The radius will be bigger when you increase the Smoothing value so the
lower the Smoothing value the smaller this circle will be (the diameter of the circle).
And you can see again that's a slightly different way of drawing once
again so it's not exactly the same as the previous option I showed you but
again it can help to really draw with accurate lines. Sometimes it might get in
the way or like here when I wanted to do a more fast turn it's probably a
little bit easier to draw without the pull-string mode but once again to draw
a more complex line here instead of using a low smooth value going up in the
smoothing value will help me to do this with one go and still get a really
nice result like that. Now if you don't like seeing that
magenta line that appears when I'm drawing, you can go to the Preferences
and under the cursors you have this new option to Show Brush Leash while
Smoothing and you can even change its color if you want to you. So that is the
new Brush Smoothing control in Photoshop CC 2018.
Make sure you give it a try whenever you work with brush based tools.