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CS4 should be powerful enough and you should have no real problems paining hair, although Mixer Brush + Bristle tips dose allow for more verity and more control. You can always upgrade later or wait for CS6. But like I said I have seen people do wonders in PS using the old brush engine, this is just additional functionality. If you have an option or desire to upgrade it's not a bad idea, but it's not absolutely necessary. Anyway, to answer you question.
The Smudge tool simulates the effect you see when you drag a finger through wet paint. The tool picks up color where the stroke begins and pushes it in the direction you drag.
The Mixer Brush simulates realistic painting techniques such as mixing colors on the canvas, combining colors on a brush, and varying paint wetness across a stroke. The Mixer Brush has two paint wells, a reservoir and a pickup. The reservoir stores the final color deposited onto the canvas and has more paint capacity. The pickup well receives paint only from the canvas; its contents are continuously mixed with canvas colors.
The Mixer Brush is like a combination of the normal brush and the smudge tool. As you paint, it smudges and mixes the color, as if you were using wet paints. It emulates real-life painting by allowing colours to be combined on a brush and various wetness settings to be applied. With the new brushes, you can control the number of bristles, length, thickness and stiffness and not only can you see the result in the brush panel, you also get an overlay window that shows you the 3D virtual brush and its bristles. The way the brush color is mixed with the canvas is controlled by three parameters – the wetness of the paint, the load of the brush and the mix amount between the paint color and the canvas color. So, a heavy load will carry more paint over a stroke than a light load; wetness smudges and mixes the canvas color with the paint color; a high mix rate will use more of the canvas color than the paint color.
For best results, a Wacom tablet like the Intuos 4 is also recommended, although not required. In addition to pressure sensitivity, the new Wacom also senses the angle of the stylus, allowing for even more realistic results.
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