Everything is very easy to follow and I was able to create a brush to my liking after a lot of tweaking back and forth.
For most of it I knew which settings to go to, and had a good idea of what changes needed to be made, except for tweaking the curves. I must admit that was a lot of pushing points randomly... I'm not very clear on how they work to affect radius, strength and jitter.
I'm used to tweaking RGB curves all the time for in color correction, and I understand those very well, but I can't say I could transfer that knowledge very easily to the brush settings... 🥴 I'm sure they work somewhat the same? But if you guys have a "curve for dummies" example, I'm all ears.
Yes Curves can be a little tricky because some curves are for the cross-section of a stroke, and others like a compressed representation of how that curve will be stretch along the entire stroke. But when it comes to pressure, it is difficult to visualise, however each graph goes from 0,0 to 1,0 like this:
Each factor can be measured along this curve, so for example, a light touch will be closer to 0 and a hard press will be closer to 1.
Let's look at Radius. The curve represents your lightest pressure to your strongest pressure. A flat gradient will smoothly increase as you apply pressure. But a curve will - much like in animation - "ease in" and "ease out" given the same pressure you apply. So you can have a brush that quickly increases in size with very light pressure 1.
or you could have a brush that you will have to push on much more to get an increase in radius 2.
Strength controls how opaque the brush is. For best results, I like to give my strength less than 1.0 so that you can see some variation to begin with. Now if the curve is like this 1.
then your opacity will increase with very little pressure. But if is its like this 2.
A light touch will create less opacity.
I hope this explains alot?
It really does!! Thanks a lot for the detailed explanation Paul! I'll go fix my pencil brush now... 😅 I was trying to get a result mostly like the 1 in strength, but less rounded of a start and end, like 2. I think I know how to amend it now.