Knowing how to effectively blend colors is arguably the most important aspect to digital painting.
Like painting, there is no one ‘right’ way to blend. Photoshop offers a number of tools you can use, and it is up to you as an artist to decide how and when to use them. This depends both on your personal preference and style, as well as what you are trying to achieve. Experiment and practice with the different tools, and you will soon discover which fit your way of working.
We’ve put together an overview of the 4 most useful techniques. To allow you to practice these techniques yourself, we’ve bundled all the brushes which you can download here for free:
Overview: 4 Essential Techniques
As you can see, each tool blends in a slightly different way. The key is to learning to use the correct technique at the right stages in your painting.
Technique 1: The Soft Edge Brush
Soft, round brushes are perfect for creating smooth gradients, both between highlights and shadows, as well as between two different colors.
Unless you’re going for a specific effect, you’ll generally want to start out with soft brushes to create the basic shapes and values. It allows you a great deal of flexibility, and lets you work out the basic, geometric shapes before you start painting in all the details.
Due to it’s round faded edges, the soft brush is the easiest tool to create smooth, blended transitions. However, over-using it can lead to muddy colors and fuzzy details. Ideally you want to use it in combination with hard edge brushes, to get some sharp edges back into your painting.
When to Use It:
- To lay out the basic structure of your painting
- When blending large, smooth surfaces
Things to Consider:
- Can lead to muddy colors if over-used, especially with too low of an opacity
- Creates soft, fuzzy edges, that can look airbrushed and generally lack details
Pro Tip:
Hold Alt to temporarily transform your brush into an eyedropper. This makes blending soo much easier!
Technique 2: The Hard Edge Brush
Whilst the soft edge brush is ideal for creating smooth gradients, the hard edge brush allows you to retain structure and edges in your paintings.
Almost every object has hard edges in one form or another. As the soft brush makes everything appear soft and gradated, we need a tool that can blend while still allowing us preserve these edges. This is where the hard edge brush excels.
Using only hard brushes, however, can lead to a sketchy, unfinished look, which may not be what you are after. Ideally you want to vary between soft and hard brushes frequently.
As its edges aren’t semi-transparent and faded, it is important to remember that you have to drop the opacity and flow when blending with a hard brush.
When to Use It:
- To preserve details in your paintings
- To create crisp edges and structure around shapes
Things to Consider:
- Difficult to create smooth gradients
Pro Tip:
When blending with a hard edge brush, lower the opacity and flow to better control your brushstrokes:
Technique 3: The Smudge Tool
Though it should be used sparingly, the smudge tool can be a handy way to very quickly blend and smooth-out overly hard edges.
Rather than painting new values on top of your painting, the smudge tool takes the existing colors and ‘smudges’ them together. This allows for very fast blending, though it can very quickly lead to muddy colors.
To use the smudge tool effectively, make sure to adapt your tool presets (as outlined in the video).
When to Use It:
- To blend away imperfections left by hard edge brushes
Things to Consider:
- Use the smudge tool sparingly as it generally doesn’t mix colors with as much accuracy and quickly leads to muddy colors
Technique 4: The Mixer Brush
The mixer brush is the closest thing to painting with real oil on a canvas, making it a very interesting tool to blend with.
Like a traditional brush, there are two ways the mixer brush can be used: to apply new ‘paint’ or values to the painting, or to smudge and blend the values that have already been laid down.
It is especially interesting to use in combination with rough, bristle brushes (see the free download link below), as this will create a textured look, similar to using a traditional dry-brush.
When to Use It:
- To add a little texture or special effects to your blending
- To create a more ‘tactile’ feel (especially useful when your painting looks airbrushed from over-using the soft edge brush
Things to Consider:
- Using the right settings is important, and varies from brush to brush
- To get started, try this free brush and use the settings described in the video
Learn to Paint Your Own Masterpiece!
Basic Brushes & Tools for Painting
Free Download:
- A variety of blocking brushes
- Textured smudge tool
- Flawless blending
- ABR Brushes (Photoshop & Procreate)
- SUT Brushes (Clip Studio Paint)
10 thoughts on “How to Blend Colors in Photoshop: 4 Essential Techniques”
I couldn’t have found these tips at a better time. Brilliant. I actually love the lines from the harder edge.
I think the link to the brushes is not properly working
Hi Juan, apologies – it should be working now again
Hey! You said you’ll show how to install the brush for smudge (I think I’ve heard this?) But I don’t find where. Because I have two files with the download, one ABR for the brush and one for the brush tool (TPL). But when I try to charge form with the smudge tool, Photoshop doesn’t find the other which is in a TPL format. Is this for another version of photoshop?
Otherwise, thank you very much for those tutorial, I was unable to paint skin and I didn’t understand why, but I think the problem was mixing. Thank you for all your videos!
Hey Sakuya, you need to upload the tool preset at the top left of the screen and the brushes at the brush panel. The tool preset and the brushes are not at the same place. To select a tool preset you also have to chose from the top let. You should see the tool/brush icon once you are on the smudge tool. Hope this helps 🙂
Hi David/Fabian, I use procreate so the only tool I have is the smudge tool, is there a way of recreating the mixer brush? Do your tips on flow and opacity still apply in procreate? I would say 80% of the time I get muddy colours especially when blending skin which is so frustrating
Hi, Jess! In Procreate you can double tap the smudge brush and choose any brush tip from your library that you have and edit its settings, in order to recreate mixer brush effects in Procreate. Hope that helps!
Thanks a lot for all your movies, that helped me a lot!
Hi, Reni! You’re so welcome, I’ll pass this thanks on to David! 😉 We’re glad that you enjoy the videos and find them helpful!