My favorite thing about Photoshop: when you do something, you can always go immediately to the Edit menu and choose Fade... which gives you thousands of ways to adjust the action you just made, by adjusting the Amount slider or the Blend mode drop down menu. I use this all the time. I don't use any other programs like PSP or Painter, so I don't know if they have this feature as well.

We do not see things as they are. ǝɹɐ ǝʍ sɐ sƃuıɥʇ ǝǝs ǝʍ