What are your brush settings at?

try going to 90-95% and go smaller and smaller

brush strokes look really harsh

Try to play around with your Brush Presets. You can access presets via pressing 'F5' on your keyboard. Once in the settings, try playing around with the Scatter settings; in particular try to play around with the jitters, they can make cool effects with smudges. Also, you should try adjusting the strength of the brush, up at the top. Generally, I use 75-88% strength, but it really depends on how you want your piece to look. Sometimes I use a large px brush, like a 80px brush with a 30% strength. Then for fine detail stuff I go down to a 20-30px brush with a 75-88% strength. But in the end it's honestly just how you want it to look. Get random stock photos and try creating cool effects along with the smudging, it's really fun.

Ignore his post.


The only setting you need is: Basic hard round brush with a 90% strength. The brush size varies, because it depends on what you want to do.
In general you want to start large and then go smaller for adding details.

depends no canvas
no, same as above
he uses soft brushing+adjustment layers(colour balance/contrast)+ c4ds i think

Like I said, it mainly depends on what you want to do.

On the tag below, I've used brush sizes between 40 and 8 px.



On my current tag I've used a brush size of 20 - 1 px.


Adding colors can be quite tricky. Make use of the layer settings, especially Multiply, Color Dodge and Linear Dodge.
Choosing the "right" colors is important as well.

€:



I don't use c4ds, nor do I ever use a soft brush.

Adjustment layers are only used at the very end to do some final minor color adjustments.

This post was edited by Sane on Apr 29 2012 07:07pm