Spot Healing Brush

With the Spot Healing Brush tool, we can quickly remove spots and other imperfections from photos.

For example, I have a picture of a young lady that I started placing a tattoo on, too optimistically, but now the look is very glum.
We will try to help her with the Spot Healing Brush.
The first thing we do is to select the “Spot Healing Brush” tool (1) in the toolbar.
Then place the cursor over the spot in the photo you want to eliminate (2), and you click.
That’s it, the stain is gone (3).
What happened? Well when the “Spot Healing Brush” tool is used, Photoshop automatically takes pixel samples around the retouching area and replaces the repair area.
While Photoshop has enough “good” pixel samples lying around it, we have no problem. But when you look at the girl’s face, you will also notice that this is not always the case.
In this case you are better with the “Healing Brush” tool, which is discussed in the next section of this lesson.

Content Aware

New in Photoshop CS5 is the “Content Aware”.

When this option is selected, the pixels are filled with similar pixels in the vicinity. We achieve the best results when we apply this option on a selection.
I will give an example.
I’ve made a selection of the man in the water, with the “Lasso” tool.

Then I click the button “Edit” in the menu bar and choose “Fill” in the drop-down menu.
In the dialog that appears, we choose “Content Aware” in the top box and we click the OK button.

The man is gone:

I think there are a lot of women who would find this very useful.

Healing Brush Tool

The difference between the “Spot Healing Brush” tool and “Healing Brush” tool is that, the “Healing Brush” itself determines the pixel samples to replace the pixels that must be changed.
The first thing you do is to select the “Healing Brush” tool in the toolbar menu (1). If you do not see it, this is below the “Spot Healing Brush” tool.
Then place the cursor over the sample pixels, that is the pixels to be copied.
You hold the Alt key on your keyboard pressed and you click (2). With this we determine the sample pixels.
Then click and drag the cursor over to the photo to replace the pixels (3), in this case the stars on her face. When you do this, the source pixels are represented by a black plus sign in the picture. When you drag the cursor to replace the pixels, you will see that this position is modified by the source pixels.

What I still want to talk about is the “Aligned” in the options bar.
When this is selected, continuous pixel samples are taken, without losing the current sample point, even when you release the mouse.
If this is not selected, the first sample point will always be reused when you interrupt and resume.

It may be hard to explain, but you should try both, but the start position of the source pixels is kept in the eye, hope this is clear.

In the next lesson we will look at how we can further help the girl by applying a filter, I can soon get the “Repair” tools again.

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