I stumbled upon the Average tool while on my Blender journey and I didn't know I needed it until then. As many others who use GIMP with a mouse, I used to rely on smudge tool
to handle the color blending, but now I see it as a tool that hold me back because I just didn't know any better.
I wanted the Average tool in GIMP so I started looking and experimenting with the tool options that we had and then I realised that GIMP had another brush engine with various smudging capabilities that looked very promising to look into. I found one by the name of "oil 06 clean" that was the most closest to the Average tool but wasn't quite perfect for me because it used dynamics that wasn't meant for mouse. I got a hint on GIMP Discord from Liam that maybe I could edit the mypaint brushes in a text editor, so I did just that and I could disable the dynamics there and also made 2 other variants with their own icons. Since then, these modified mypaint smudge brushes became my go-to solution for color blending/averaging!
Since these 3 brushes are pretty much the only ones I use, I put a "_" (underscore) before their names to make them appear on the very top of the list of the mypaint tool for ease of reach.
- The main brush is
color average which has 3 uses:
It averages color within the radius. Best to use where at least two colors meet (obviously).
Pushing colors (smudging). Avoid more than one color in the radius to keep the source color.
To define edges. If things go blurry, run this tool along the edge to make things sharp again.
-
Smoke blend is almost the same brush but with jitter. It was originally named snow blend (thus the icon) and is good for softer blending.
-
Noise blend is a little brush with crazy jitter. I found it useful for perserving noise on images while blending at the same time.
- As with all mypaint brushes, these have a preset that resets everytime you switch mypaint brushes (but not when you switch tools in GIMP) so keep that in mind.
I make them available here in a zip file because I believe this is something that could prove very useful for those who use mouse and want to have a much better color blending experience.
("Fox" WIP)