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The Healing Brush Tools

Lesson 26 from: FAST CLASS: Photoshop for Beginners: Essential Training

Mark Wallace

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Lesson Info

26. The Healing Brush Tools

Use the Healing Brush and Spot Healing brush to correct imperfections in an image. In this session, Mark demonstrates the tools and explains why they are perfect for skin retouching and fixing issues with sensor dust.

Lesson Info

The Healing Brush Tools

Let's take a look at the healing brush tool. Now the healing brush tool comes in a few different flavors and it's perfect for removing sensor dust that maybe shows up in your image or maybe spots that are on a white background, skin blemishes, or unwanted areas -- maybe a tattoo or something that you want to get rid of. You can do it really easily with the healing brush tools. So to do this, what I want to do first is go to the background layer and unlock that. So we can do some things. I'm gonna rename this layer. So I'm gonna click -- double click on the layer name and then I can type in "Kanka" so that we have a name of that layer right there. And then I'm going to double click the magnifying glass to go all the way into full resolution, a hundred percent and hit the space bar and this drag Kanka's face over here. So we can really see what we're doing. Now we wanna do non-destructive editing And so I wanna make a copy of this Kanka layer so that we can do some retouching on a differ...

ent layer. So if I make mistakes, I can always undo those things. I can mask them out. We can do non-destructive editing this way. So let's go over to the layers palette, and then to make a copy of this layer I simply click and drag this down to the plus sign and that's going to make a copy. I'm gonna double click on the name of the layer and I'm gonna name this "skin retouch". It's always a good idea to rename your layers so that you know exactly which layers are doing what. Okay, let's take a look now at the healing brushes. So over here on the left hand side in your tools palette about, I don't know, a quarter of the way down, you should see -- click and hold -- you'll see the spot healing brush, the healing brush tool the patch tool, the content aware move tool, and the red eye tool. We're gonna be dealing with the spot and healing brush tools in this session. So what we wanna first do is learn about the healing brush tool. What does that do? Well, the healing brush tool is for healing areas of an image and the way it works is you tell Photoshop, "Hey, I want to sample this thing over here and then use the texture and the patterns of this stuff -- Maybe the skin tones -- and put it over here." We're not going to be cloning. We're not gonna make a direct copy. We're just saying, "Hey, take the texture and stuff and sort of put this over here so this matches its surrounding area using this sample over here." So let me show you this in real life. And so what we're gonna do here is I'm going to go all the way into maybe 200% so you can really see this. And this is just for the video. Normally I would only do this at 100% to see exactly what I'm doing. I'm gonna make sure I have the healing brush tool. And now over here, what I want to do is I'm going to hit the option or alt key and notice that my cursor turns into a little target. It's saying this is the area I want to sample from so I'm gonna click there and then I'm gonna go over here and notice that my cursor turns into the pattern of the sampled area. So it's saying, take that texture and put it over here. So now I'm just gonna paint and notice that as I hold the mouse we have an X. That's where we're going from and the circle, that's where we're going to. So I'm just gonna do that. Say, fix this over here. I'm gonna hit alt and set a target right here And then we're gonna brush that in right there. And you can see that I can really quickly go in and fix these areas. It's really fast. There is one way that's even faster than that. You don't have quite the precision of saying this is where I want to choose from, but it's one that I prefer for doing most retouching things, And that is just the spot healing tool. So if I go over here to the spot healing brush what it's going to do is it's going to look for the areas around the brush. And so we know that because up here in the options bar we have proximity match, create texture and content aware. So first let me show you proximity match and how that option works. So we have this blemish right here. And so what I'm going to do here is I'm just going to paint over that. That's all I have to do. So what the tool is doing, it's saying, "Hey, look at the proximity of the area that's adjacent to where you're painting, take those textures and make this thing match that." Let's heal it using this stuff around us. So I can just go in and very quickly retouch all these little blemishes. It's really fast, and this is where the pen tool is or the tablet really makes a huge difference, because you can change the size and the shape of the brush just by pushing and making the pressure more or less. And you can really get in here and do small retouches and things like that. Okay, let's talk about content aware and what that's doing. So if you notice we have this hair that's going through Kanka's eyebrow. So what content aware does -- it's similar to proximity match, but what it says is if you see there's a clear delineation between what you're painting from and what you're going to, stop healing. Be aware of what's around you. Be sort of aware of the content that you're retouching. So for this, if I want to retouch this hair but I don't wanna go into her eyebrow, it's okay. I can just use the content aware brush. So as I'm brushing here -- I'm gonna go into the eyebrow -- notice it's healed the hair outside of the eyebrow, but it stops once it gets the eyebrow. It's aware of its content. I can go down here and say, let's fix this. And I don't have to worry about being super accurate because the brush is aware of its surroundings, And so you can go in and do all these really finite retouching things just because it's content aware. It's gonna be aware of what you're doing. Okay, let's look at a couple other uses for these brushes. So let's go over here to Sandy.jpeg. Again, I'm going to unlock the background. I'm gonna create a copy of this background layer using a shortcut key, and that is command or control J. So instead of dragging it down to the plus we're gonna use command and control J, and bam. I make a copy. So in the future, I'll always be using that shortcut key: Command or control J to copy a layer. But what I want to do is I want to rename this. I'm just gonna call this "retouch". Again, we're creating a copy of the layer, so if we screw things up we can always go in and undo those. It is a non-destructive way to do things. So let's go in a hundred percent and then I'm gonna use my hand tool, sort of go here. And we can see that on this area right here We have some sensor dust. We have sensor dust here. We have some sensor dust in our hair. We've got sensor dust here. So we've got a dirty sensor that needs to be cleaned up. So all we have to do is again let's go get our spot healing tool and then I'm gonna change the size of the brush by hitting the right bracket on the keyboard and then I can just say, "Hey, fix that." And I can go down here and I fix that and I'm just really quickly painting those out. Now this one is in hair, so if I just paint really fine you can see it does a pretty good job of replacing that and using the hair surrounding the the brush to fill that in. And then I can just go and do that for all the dust spots in this image until it's all cleaned up and good to go.

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