Stroke Smoothing

Stroke smoothing steadies the brush: instead of following every wobble of your hand, the brush trails the cursor and evens the path out. The controls are in the Brush Settings accordion, below the falloff curve, and they are the same rows on the Paint tab and the Sculpt tab — one setting drives both. Smoothing is off by default.

The smoothing controls

Control	What it does	Default
Smoothing	How strongly the stroke is smoothed, from 0 to 1. 0 is off: the brush goes exactly where you move. Double-click to type a value; the reset button beside it returns it to 0.	0
Smoothing Style	How the brush follows the cursor: Pulled String, Weighted, Stabilizer or Dyna (below). The Smoothing slider sets how strong the style is — for Dyna, how heavy the pen is.	Pulled String
Catch-up on stroke end	When you let go, the lagging brush is drawn on to where the cursor stopped, so the stroke ends where you ended it. Off, the stroke stops short by however far the brush was trailing.	Off

All three are stored with the brush when you use Save Brush, so a lettering brush can keep a heavy stabilizer while your blocking-in brush stays unsmoothed. See Saving a brush.

The smoothing styles

Style	How the brush follows	Good for
Pulled String	The brush follows on a string and waits until it is taut: it does not move until the cursor is a string's length away, then trails exactly that far behind. This is the classic “lazy brush”.	Clean lines and deliberate curves; small wobbles inside the string's slack never reach the surface.
Weighted	The brush takes the average of the last stretch of the path, rounding every turn. It is driven by movement: hold the cursor still and the brush stays where it lagged until you move again (or Catch-up pulls it in).	Smooth, flowing strokes with rounded corners.
Stabilizer	The brush takes the average of where the cursor was over the last moments, so it keeps gliding after you stop. It is driven by time: a jittery hand averages out however slowly it moves.	Slow, careful work with a shaky hand or a noisy pen.
Dyna	The brush is a pen with weight: it lags on a fast move, swings a little wide round corners and settles onto the cursor (Krita's Dyna). Smoothing is the pen's weight; 0 is the cursor itself.	Calligraphic, swinging strokes with momentum.

The trailing distance is measured in screen pixels, not in brush sizes, so a given Smoothing value feels the same whatever the brush radius and however far you are zoomed in. Dyna is stepped at a fixed rate, so it feels the same at any frame rate.

Painting and sculpting

The four styles and Catch-up work the same way in both tabs while you drag. The one difference is what happens when you release:

• Paint — Smoothing also rounds the corners out of the final stroke actually painted onto the mesh, when the stroke is redrawn on release.
• Sculpt — a sculpt stroke has no redraw, so Smoothing only drags the brush behind the cursor, filtering out hand jitter and frame-rate steps.

Brushes that set their own smoothing

Some imported brushes come with a smoothing setting of their own: a Krita Dyna preset arrives with the Dyna style, its pen weight taken from the preset, and a MyPaint brush's slow tracking becomes its smoothing. See What each format brings.