How To Smudge And Not Lose The Color?

[rich2005]

For that sort of image I would use the clone tool. As Ofnuts pointed out there are other ways. The Gimp dodge/burn tool does the lighten/darken. All depends on the image.

The gimp docs https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-tool-clone.html

This demo using the clone tool 3 minutes might give some clues.





direct link https://youtu.be/VKh8v3HISV8