There is something built into photoshop called the smudge brush but its a pretty lame solution especially for hi-res print files.
Until they do come up with a solid blender like Painter’s, using ALT key to pick nearby values and with a soft brush painting them into the image is your best bet.
actually i use the healing brush like don seegmiller suggest in his books … but would love a native brush by photoshop
wouldn’t we all ? 
anyways there are some other hack methods using blurred masks and such but they are tedious and I end up feeling icky having to do things in such a round about way.
At work I regularly switch between Painter and photoshop just to get some neat tools in my work.
Now with the advent of Cs4 64bit and the rotate canvas function, imo the only major thing missing is the pixel blending technology and its bye bye painter ( unles painter finally comes up with a cool water color engine that behave like the real deal )
Unless Corel hires a staff who can actually develope then I don’t see Painter getting new tools, but fear not, someone else made this amazing software called MoXi which mimics actual ink and watercolor behavor among other simulations like paper texture or liquid masking:
I had seen that vid sometime back, workbench and it would be cool if some main stream application developers would license the technology and make it multi threaded, GPU aware and of course 64bit. With all the tech stuff going on in the 3D realm ( zbrush, Mudbox, ICE ) why doesn’t Adobe or someone else ( Autodesk ? ) develop it for the 2d platform.
I mean Maya’s fluids solve very well on 2d planes. Would be awesome if we could see that feature in painter or photoshop. Or maybe develop Z-brush’s pixols technology for an OIL paint based system.
2D technology has still some way to go.
Photoshop is a verry good in images and so on,but when I go blending and so on,then import the picture in painter IX and do there the importent paintwork. She are good working togheter.
And painter have then the right tools for blending with a brush and you can it manipulated.
all regards
Gavobe
I hear that a lot on these boards, and indeed I have seen some awful stuff done with the smudge tool.
But I use the smudge tool a lot, I don't think there is anything wrong with the tool if you use it right with the correct settings. Even Linda Bergkvist said it was a useful tool for blending. Though I believe her preferred method was using very large paint brushes at low opacity. I prefer the smudge tool though.
The only issue is like you say with hi-res files where you want a big big brush, it can start to lag and kill your RAM.
Possible solution (albeit slightly awkward one) is to do all your smudging in an old copy of PS5 where it does pretty much the same thing but doesn't need half as much resources.Where do I get PS5 ? :). Anyways real time blending like painters would be cool. Just like in Painter I should be able to choose blending mode on or off while setting up the brush properties.
I use the alt key often to pick up surrounding areas and use that to blend works faster and there is no lag for hi-res images.
Until Photoshop comes up with the real deal I guess we are stuck with workarounds.
I suggest playing with the brush editor…you can get very powerful and excellent blending brushes using the smudge brush.
By default, it just drags pixels into each…but with a little tweaking you get cat some impressive results.
Key attribute is playing with the scatter and count + jitter attributes so that it will smudge in multiple directions at once.
Works very well with the blur brush to.
if you used the smudge tool there is alot to do with that stuff. I blend weel good,but you must play with that tool and your setting and then can you creating a lot of blendings.
all regards
the traditional artist
gavobe
I do all of that with the regular brush so I am aware that I can tweak it with some funky results. My main grouse is that it can lag quite a bit and take me out of the creative process when I am dealing with Hi-res print files.
Using the smudge tool with scatter you can have good results but you can’t color pick and using large brushes is simply too slow on my system, usually I stick with 32px smudge brushes.
if you have a slow pc,there is a good program that is free, and that is inkscape.
Give it a try. it is a opensource program.
all regards
Something I was playing with was to use the clone tool with scatter, where you are painting on one layer but cloning from a different layer, so you are continually picking the colour from the layer directly beneath. I thought there might be some interesting possibilities with that, especially if you set the brush blend mode to something like multiply or dodge. I’m not sure for it would be of any use for blending, but perhaps someone else could find a use for it though.
Have to say that once i started playing with the setting on the smudge tool I am much happier. I basically use my custom clould brush , opacity shut down and scattering on and spacing set low and the clone tool works as well as painter’s ‘just add water’ I want to thank all for reminding me that all tools in photoshop are customize-able.
I have a pretty powerful system a quad core mac pro with 10 Gb of ram so its not the system thats choking.
anyways as is often the case with Photoshop u can almost do anything if u know the program well to do work arounds.
It is not for nothing that its called THE killer app in its segment. Just needs to broaden its scope to include genuine/traditional painting features.
i am one that disagrees with this. The genuine/ traditional features are in painter and such. I actually like that photoshop is a DIGITAL painting tool
not a copy of traditional tools. That allows me to use it as a whole different tools than painter or airbrushing ect.
I don’t think by adding a blending engine in the brushes options and improving the “smoothing” setting to damp the brush strokes to act more softly wouldn’t stop it from being Photoshop, just think that these workrounds wouldn’t be necessary anymore.
Workbench i agree those are just tweeks i just mean a complete overhaul would be pointless… there is painter for that and most of us use both 
Workbench i agree those are just tweeks i just mean a complete overhaul would be pointless… there is painter for that and most of us use both
Indeed but it would mean less swapping of the image files and the small troubles that come with it like un supported modes between painter and Photoshop .
If Photoshop can come up with a blending engine to go with its awesome brush engine ( which AFAIK is borrowed from the painter brush engine but is more intuitive and has lesser settings to tweak ) then it would mean that I spend lesser time in painter and more in Photoshop which is what I would prefer.
The blending option can simply be turned off when desired. Whats wrong with that ?