From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: The Basics

Removing distracting elements with the Healing brush and Patch tools - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2021 Essential Training: The Basics

Start my 1-month free trial

Removing distracting elements with the Healing brush and Patch tools

- [Instructor] Photoshop has a number of tools that make it easy to remove small distracting elements in an image. In the next few minutes, we're going to take a look at the spot healing brush, as well as the healing brush, the patch tool and the clone stamp tool. So begin by zooming into a hundred percent by using command-one on Mac or control-one on Windows, and then hold down the space bar in order to navigate to the lower left area in this image. I'm going to start with the spot healing brush. So I'll select it, and across the top, there are a number of different options. The one I'm going to select is content-aware because it's going to compare the nearby image content. And then it's going to try to maintain details such as shadows and object edges. We could also try the create texture but that really just does create a texture and the proximity match, while it's useful because it uses pixels around the edge of the selection to find an area to use as a match, I really feel that content-aware is going to give us the best option most of the time. Now if we want to do our retouching in a nondestructive manner, I'll want to enable the sample all layers option, and then in the layers panel, I'll go ahead and click the plus icon to create a new blank layer. Then I'll go ahead and just click and paint over any of the distracting elements that I see in my image, and Photoshop will automatically replace those areas using that content-aware fill technology. And I find this works really, really well, especially when you've just got smaller areas that you want to fix. So I would typically go through my entire image just removing those small areas that might be distracting. All right, we'll move all the way over here, and I'll just remove that as well. Now, when I get to larger areas, I find that I need a little bit more control. So I'll switch from the spot healing brush to the healing brush tool. Now I'm going to need to hold down the option key on Mac or the alt key on Windows in order to set my sample point. You'll notice that there is no content-aware option here because basically you are the content-aware, you're telling it where to choose the content from. I'll want to make sure that I set this to sample from all layers or at least the current layer and below. All right, I'll use the space bar again to return to that left-hand corner, and then I'll start by holding down the option key, and I'm going to set my sample point in this good area of sand up here. And then I'm going to paint over this larger cube of ice and you can see it's actually doing it as I paint. So again, I'll just select a good area to sample from and then start painting in order to remove the area that I no longer want to see. So this I can see is working quite well, especially on some of these, maybe the larger pieces of ice that maybe the spot healing brush wouldn't have done quite as nice of a job on. So I'll continue over here, just removing kind of these medium-size pieces. Let's go ahead and give it a try here. I'll sample from the right of this area and then paint in order to remove it. In fact, let's get rid of this rock here as well. We'll see if it does a good job. It does, but it's blending in a lighter area. I just didn't go far enough. So let's paint over a bigger area in order to remove that. Excellent. So the next tool in the list here is the patch tool and it works really well, especially in areas that have subtle gradations. I do want to make sure that I change the patch to patch from content-aware, instead of just that normal mode. And again, I want it to sample all layers. Then I'll go ahead and move to a quite large area here. Let's see if it can go ahead and patch this. I'm not really sure, that's a little bit larger than an area that I usually select, but once I've got it selected I just reposition the source area where I want it to sample from and then release the cursor in order to patch that area. And one thing that's unique about this tool is you can actually change the way it patches after the fact, so I could change the structure here, either increasing or decreasing it. When I decrease that I'm telling it it can't change the structure as much. When I increase it, I'm telling it to be a little bit more flexible when it fills that area. I can also change the amount of color. Now, here the colors match very well at zero. At 10, I'm getting all of these artifacts in there. So I'm going to go ahead and decrease that back to zero and tap in order to dismiss that slider and then use command-D to deselect. All right, let's move over a little bit further. I'm going to hold off on that one because I do want to show you up here, this is what I meant by a nice kind of gradiated area. So if I select this top area, then I can just choose to patch it from here, and then I can come down here, maybe patch that area, then probably select this whole area at one time and just drag this over to an area that's somewhat similar and release the cursor in order to patch that. Again, don't forget before you deselect it you could always hide your edges using command-H on Mac or control-H on Windows and then adjust this structure to see if it can get a better blend. I'll go ahead and move that down to one. Let's see if we adjust the color a little bit. I'll just move that up. And I kind of prefer that, so I'll leave that there. Now don't forget, your marching ants are still there. They're just hidden, so I'm going to use command-H in order to show them and then command-D in order to deselect. Now I can still see a little bit of an edge right there so I could either go in and just patch that area or we could use one of the other tools. So for example, I could return to the healing brush or the spot healing brush if I wanted to sample an area in order to go ahead and adjust it a little bit more. All right, let's move back down here to the bottom area. And I'm actually going to switch now to the clone stamp tool. Now this is a tool that I absolutely love, it does an excellent job of duplicating one area to hide an area that you don't like. But the thing, is it's a little bit trickier to use because you have to match the colors and tones. Photoshop's going to create an exact duplicate. It's not going to blend the tones, like all of the other healing brush and patch tool does. So I just want to make sure here that I've got it set to sample the current and below or all of the layers, and then I need to hold down that option key like we did with the healing brush to set my sample point and then I can go ahead and come in here and just remove some of the areas that I don't want. And you can see that I can get a nice kind of hard edge here a little bit harder than I did with the healing brush. The healing brushes would try to blend in this edge or if I want to, I can just remove this completely. All right, I'm going to scoot over and I'm going to pick a good source, maybe right over here, again, holding down the option key to set that source. And then when I start painting, we can see where the source material is coming from and where I'm painting over. So I'm going to get rid of a really large area here, and you can see it's quite convenient that I can watch that source area, because then I know if I'm going to get in trouble if it's going to go over an area that I don't like. So for example, when I get too close to that other iceberg I'm going to stop using the stamp tool and cloning that area, and instead I'm going to hold down the option key and then just select from a different area. So in this image with all this nice sand, it's actually quite easy for me to select a good area and then replace it with that extra stand. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and just finish up right here. I might need to get a little bit smaller of a brush using the left bracket key in order to just get a little bit of a harder edge there, around that ice. And then we can just move over. I might get rid of this little item right here. Again, I'll just option-click and then start painting with the clone stamp tool. Now, one thing I noticed is you don't want to stop just because the iceberg's gone. I want to also remove any shadows in the image as well as kind of any of the areas, in this case in the sand where, because that ice was there, it's going to create a different pattern in that sand. All right, I'll just scoot over to the right. There's a few other areas, I'm always trying to be really careful around the edge of my image. I don't want any distracting elements. Oh, and let's get rid of this. Again, I'll just hold down the option key or the alt key to set my sample point and then paint in to get rid of this footstep that someone else has left in the sand. All right, so just a moment more and I'll go ahead and remove that, and then making sure that I go in if I see any repeating elements or anything that's still distracting and just remove those. All right, let's zoom out. I'll use command-zero on the Mac in order to fit on screen, and we can see we still have all of our original information in the background layer and our retouching layer above that. I'll actually go ahead and rename that retouching. And if I toggle the visibility on and off, we can see the before and after. All right, I'm going to go ahead and do a quick file and save as, I want to save this as ice on beach. I'll just append it with an underscore 01, save it back into the local pixel editing as a layered PSD or Photoshop document, and then click save. And as you can see Photoshop's healing brushes and the patch tool and the clone stamp tool are really helpful when retouching distracting elements from a photograph.

Contents