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Question about Photoshop Brush "Smoothing" setting

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sirhawkeye64

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I noticed recently that setting this setting to 100% leads to lag when brushing, particularly when doing so quickly and/or over large areas. I found (through some searching) that reducing this or setting it to 0% can increase it's performance (and that the purpose of this setting is for more "polished" adjustments/brush strokes along things like edges, and perhaps is beneficial for tablet users).

My question is if I'm brushing a large area, and I set this to 0% does that impact the quality of the strokes, if I'm doing say 100% opacity and 100% flow, does this impact the quality of the brush strokes (as there are areas in some of my images where I need the bottom layer to show through completely so I tend to brush those quickly with 100% opacity and flow, but with the smoothing set to 100% this can be a bit laggy).

I'm just wondering if we can think of smoothing as more of a setting for "speed" and not necessarily that it would impact how the brush works, it just allows for more precise brush strokes?
 
Watching this thread. Maybe we can bump it up some.
 
sirhawkeye64 said:
I noticed recently that setting this setting to 100% leads to lag when brushing, particularly when doing so quickly and/or over large areas. I found (through some searching) that reducing this or setting it to 0% can increase it's performance (and that the purpose of this setting is for more "polished" adjustments/brush strokes along things like edges, and perhaps is beneficial for tablet users).

My question is if I'm brushing a large area, and I set this to 0% does that impact the quality of the strokes, if I'm doing say 100% opacity and 100% flow, does this impact the quality of the brush strokes (as there are areas in some of my images where I need the bottom layer to show through completely so I tend to brush those quickly with 100% opacity and flow, but with the smoothing set to 100% this can be a bit laggy).

I'm just wondering if we can think of smoothing as more of a setting for "speed" and not necessarily that it would impact how the brush works, it just allows for more precise brush strokes?
Click to expand...
Correct.

Loading…

helpx.adobe.com
 
sirhawkeye64 said:
I noticed recently that setting this setting to 100% leads to lag when brushing, particularly when doing so quickly and/or over large areas. I found (through some searching) that reducing this or setting it to 0% can increase it's performance (and that the purpose of this setting is for more "polished" adjustments/brush strokes along things like edges, and perhaps is beneficial for tablet users).

My question is if I'm brushing a large area, and I set this to 0% does that impact the quality of the strokes, if I'm doing say 100% opacity and 100% flow, does this impact the quality of the brush strokes (as there are areas in some of my images where I need the bottom layer to show through completely so I tend to brush those quickly with 100% opacity and flow, but with the smoothing set to 100% this can be a bit laggy).

I'm just wondering if we can think of smoothing as more of a setting for "speed" and not necessarily that it would impact how the brush works, it just allows for more precise brush strokes?
Click to expand...
No, it does not impact the quality of the brush stroke

It "smooths" the brush stroke as you change direction.

Try this experiment. Create two triangles. With smoothing off, brush the triangle up to the peak and back down the other leg. Then turn on smoothing at 100% setting and do the same on another triangle.

At the infection point at the triangle's peak, the brush stroke is less sharp or smooth, as in the image below.

The faster you draw, the more of the smoothing.

Hope that helps





f4575dbc6c944a0cb987a3b29abf8fe1.jpg

--


John Wheeler
Never give up. Never surrender. Galaxy Quest :)
 
Last edited:
Kaj E said:
sirhawkeye64 said:
I noticed recently that setting this setting to 100% leads to lag when brushing, particularly when doing so quickly and/or over large areas. I found (through some searching) that reducing this or setting it to 0% can increase it's performance (and that the purpose of this setting is for more "polished" adjustments/brush strokes along things like edges, and perhaps is beneficial for tablet users).

My question is if I'm brushing a large area, and I set this to 0% does that impact the quality of the strokes, if I'm doing say 100% opacity and 100% flow, does this impact the quality of the brush strokes (as there are areas in some of my images where I need the bottom layer to show through completely so I tend to brush those quickly with 100% opacity and flow, but with the smoothing set to 100% this can be a bit laggy).

I'm just wondering if we can think of smoothing as more of a setting for "speed" and not necessarily that it would impact how the brush works, it just allows for more precise brush strokes?
Click to expand...
Correct.

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/optimize-painting-and-cloning.html
Click to expand...
OK although this is a bit strange as I only encountered fairly recently with the latest version of PS 2025 (in fact I think I don't recall it being this bad in 2024 and even early releases of 2025 back late last year). I've been using the same hardware and software so that didn't change but perhaps the refinements to smoothing have just required more processing over the past few updates to PS. I guess for now I'll just adjust it down for when I'm brushing large areas (over complex edges I can go slower and that's fine, but painting over larger areas was laggy and annoying, but I guess now that I know this, I can adjust accordingly).
 
JohnWheeler said:
sirhawkeye64 said:
I noticed recently that setting this setting to 100% leads to lag when brushing, particularly when doing so quickly and/or over large areas. I found (through some searching) that reducing this or setting it to 0% can increase it's performance (and that the purpose of this setting is for more "polished" adjustments/brush strokes along things like edges, and perhaps is beneficial for tablet users).

My question is if I'm brushing a large area, and I set this to 0% does that impact the quality of the strokes, if I'm doing say 100% opacity and 100% flow, does this impact the quality of the brush strokes (as there are areas in some of my images where I need the bottom layer to show through completely so I tend to brush those quickly with 100% opacity and flow, but with the smoothing set to 100% this can be a bit laggy).

I'm just wondering if we can think of smoothing as more of a setting for "speed" and not necessarily that it would impact how the brush works, it just allows for more precise brush strokes?
Click to expand...
No, it does not impact the quality of the brush stroke

It "smooths" the brush stroke as you change direction.

Try this experiment. Create two triangles. With smoothing off, brush the triangle up to the peak and back down the other leg. Then turn on smoothing at 100% setting and do the same on another triangle.

At the infection point at the triangle's peak, the brush stroke is less sharp or smooth, as in the image below.

The faster you draw, the more of the smoothing.

Hope that helps

f4575dbc6c944a0cb987a3b29abf8fe1.jpg
Click to expand...
Yes thanks this does. For my uses, I'm mostly doing masking and "painting" for photo editing so absolutely smoothness (except maybe along complex edges like where the sky meets a mountain) aren't as critical (such as masking large areas). But it sounds like I can adjust the smoothing for larger areas to speed up the process, and then increase it for areas where more-fined-tuned strokes are needed (more accuracy/smoothness). Although I do try to use the auto-masking features when possible which I guess has made me a little lazy when it comes to brushing since LR and PS do a pretty good job with auto-mask (when it's an option) so I tend to brush a bit quicker as a result.

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PLEASE NOTE: I usually unsubscribe from forums and comments after a period of time, so if I do not respond, that is likely the reason. Feel free to PM me if you have a questions or need clarification about a comment I made.
 
Last edited:
sirhawkeye64 said:
I noticed recently that setting this setting to 100% leads to lag when brushing, particularly when doing so quickly and/or over large areas. I found (through some searching) that reducing this or setting it to 0% can increase it's performance (and that the purpose of this setting is for more "polished" adjustments/brush strokes along things like edges, and perhaps is beneficial for tablet users).

My question is if I'm brushing a large area, and I set this to 0% does that impact the quality of the strokes, if I'm doing say 100% opacity and 100% flow, does this impact the quality of the brush strokes (as there are areas in some of my images where I need the bottom layer to show through completely so I tend to brush those quickly with 100% opacity and flow, but with the smoothing set to 100% this can be a bit laggy).

I'm just wondering if we can think of smoothing as more of a setting for "speed" and not necessarily that it would impact how the brush works, it just allows for more precise brush strokes?
Click to expand...
Exactamundo as others said.

Play with it and you will feel it always want to " stay in the lane" so to speak.

Imagine you are driving a car and a hand is always keeping you from leaving the road, you cant turn hard right - left it keeps you in a slower deliberate turn, when you go straight, it lags to make sure it is straight etc not wobbly ..

If you were drawing a wheat field in the wind ,smoothing would help them all look curvelinear and a bit hooked don the end without looking " cut off", w/o smoothing it may be too sensitive to every change in direction and the stalks would look less natural,

it would help make drawing the curves etc easier or hair etc anything with fine curvelinear detail, it would not be needed for a blue print with straight lines only.

If your brush is acting wonky on regular work - check smoothing is off.

Also Spacing is a great function for making anything from rain to laser blob beams - cheers
 
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