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I want to know if i can adjust my brush falloff in Photoshop. The soft round brush in particular.

You may be familiar with this concept if you are ZBrush user. This picture illustrate what i'm looking for:

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Is there any other painting software that have this option?

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3 Answers 3

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You can't control a curve of a round brush falloff in Photoshop. The only way to emulate this is to create custom brush tips (via Edit > Define Brush Preset)

enter image description here

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Photoshop is littered with brush falloff options for many, many, parts of brushes.

Adobe calls them Brush Dynamics and many of them may only be available if you have a drawing tablet on your system.

Viewing the Brushed Panel (Window > Brushes), the left side of the panel has the dynamics which are available.

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Taking a look at something like the Shape Dynamics...

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There's a falloff (which Adobe calls "Jitter") for size, angle, and roundness.

The Transfer options will allow control of the Jitter (or "falloff") of Opacity and Flow. Wetness and Mix are available if you have those options ticked on the left.

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  • None of these options are what he's asked about. I too would like to have falloff control over the brush shape.
    – frodo2975
    Aug 24, 2019 at 6:25
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Workaround in GIMP:

In GIMP making a custom brush is made especially easy: The content of the clipboard is automatically available in the brushes collection. It can also made permanent by applying Edit > Paste as new brush.

I painted a radial gradient black to transparency and copied it to the clipboard. That's my automatic clipboard brush. Here's one click dot and a random stroke drawn with that brush in otherwise empty layer in another image:

enter image description here

In GIMP alpha (=opacity) is as adjustable as RGB color components. By applying Color > Curves > Alpha I can adjust the falloff afterwards in the whole layer or a selection:

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The solid mid part is now wider and the falloff to transparency is made steeper. Adjustable width strokes are possible.

In the next image the result is weird. Solid mid part is made transparent:

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One can think it's the same if one applies the alpha curve trick to the gradient dot before or after making it brush. But it isn't. Better control can be got by applying the curves to painted strokes. That's because brushes work in a harmful way. Painted strokes are like numerous consequent clicks, the repeating rate is controlled by parameter named "spacing". The paint cumulates and the result is generally denser than a single click if the automatic repeats overlap.

One can increase the spacing to keep the stroke thinner, but the stroke starts easily look like it's made of separate dots. This happens if the spacing is sparser than the remaining solid looking dot width after the alpha curve trick.

NOTE: In low resolution the gradients are coarse, the adjustment is also coarse.

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