Photoelectron escape fluxes computed by the two-stream approximation can be significantly improved by using the formal solutions to the transport equation in much the same way as these fluxes are generated by the modified diffusion method. The improvement results from a first-order correction for departures from isotropy. Furthermore, good estimates of the pitch angle distributions at all collision depths can easily be obtained from the formal solutions with the source functions approximated by any of the generalized numerical methods. Such estimates provide direct assessments of the angular distribution assumptions entering the basic solutions.