The only tool we have not checked out at a real world basis here is the smudge tool. How might we go about using it? well, what I want to do with the smudge is smear the clouds. I want to create some movement to the clouds inside the sky and we are going to do it in as fairly unconventional manner. So, what I want you to do, if you are working inside the full screen mode without your palettes like I am. So, I am going to press the tab key again to bring back your palette.

I am going to go ahead and switch to the smudge tool here which I can do by pressing the “R” key. Just bear in mind that it is in that same slot as the blur tool that is why I use the “R” key. I am going to increase the size of my brush dramatically. So, I am pressing on the right bracket key several times until I get about 600 pixel brush. As you may recall it, I told you not to use big brushes with the smudge tool that is why what I am about to do is unconventional. You will see why you do not typically want to work with big brushes but for this effect, I do.

Now, notice that mode is set to normal. That means, all colors get smeared to same extent. What I want to do is choose lighten. So, I only want to see the effects of the smudge tool if it lightens the background. That way, it will better match this big, huge, bright spot inside the image. I am going to leave the strength set to 50%. All the rest of the stuff is just ducky.

Now, I am going to move over my image, so we can see what I am doing. I do not want you to drag with the tool because Photoshop cannot even begin to keep up with your drag at this point. In fact, what I am about to do is going to be kind of slow. I want you to click, just click with the tool. Nothing will happen. You have not done anything. All you have done is you have set a starting point for the drag that you are about to do.

So, click right above the mountain with your tool then move your brush directly to the right about this distance and then press the “Shift” key and click. And then just sit here and listen to me while the tools works away and you are going to actually see this animated cloud effect in the background because Photoshop is struggling to keep up with your click. That is almost struggling to keep up with this in this point. The shift click goes ahead and connects this original click point with this second click point. So, drag the brushstroke, straight brushstroke of smudginess between those two points.

And now, let us go ahead and now let us go ahead and repeat this process up in this region of the sky. Click again, move to the right, and shift click. So, we have about two to three inches between our click and shift click points and there goes again, it is animating to show me the effects of moving the clouds across the sky. Again, it is not really trying to show me anything. This is just Photoshop struggling to keep up with what I have done.

At that point, you can move around and change location of your cursor. The program is not going to let you do anything until it completely finishes, until it looks like it is done, click and shift click one more time just to get a little more of that wonderful streakiness in the sky. It gives the image kind of a painterly effect, I think.

Now, I must admit it can be pretty frustrating waiting out the smudge tool with this big, huge brush and everything. So, especially censors know a way to gage when it is done. There is no progress bar or anything like that. You just have to wait in an indefinite amount of time until things seem to be done working. Well, if you want to absolutely track the progress of the smudge tool, go over here to the history palette which you can get to by choosing the history command from the window menu and toward the bottom of the palette, you should see a bunch of smudge tool operations here. In all, I got six.

The first one is the click point; the second one is the shift click point; then shift click, click, click, shift click. Alright. So, it shows you when the sponge tool gets done working. And just to create a division so that we can see a cle