From the course: Photoshop One-on-One: Fundamentals

Using the Spot Healing Brush - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop One-on-One: Fundamentals

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Using the Spot Healing Brush

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- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll introduce you to the first and foremost retouching tool inside Photoshop. It's the easiest one to use as well. And it goes by the name spot healing brush. And so here we have a young lady who seems to be getting the most out of life. How do we go about healing her wounds, and other skin details as well? So we can be talking about pores or pimples or what have you. Well, the answer is this bandaid right here, and if you're not seeing it, then click and hold on whatever tool you see below the eyedropper and choose the spot healing brush from the top of the fly out menu. Notice that it has a keyboard shortcut of J. And the way I remember that is if you misspell the word surgery, it would have a J in it. All right, so I'm going to go ahead and turn that layer off. Now, this is a brush tool, by the way, much like the brush that we saw in the previous chapter which means if you right click with the tool you can change its size, its hardness. Notice we also have access to a spacing value. I would love that if we had that with the brush tool as well, and then we've got an angle, and roundness and so forth. Now by default the hardness is cranked up to 100%. That's generally where you want to leave it and I'll explain why that is in just a moment. But for now I'm just going to dismiss that panel by pressing the enter key. All right, I want to direct your attention to these type options up here. They start with content aware. So the idea is that the spot healing brush is going to source data from inside the photograph. So it's looking at the other pixels in the photo, and it's going to automatically repeat those pixels wherever you paint. If you leave things set to content aware, then Photoshop is going to source pixels from all over the place, inside the image. If you switch it to create texture then you're going to try to simulate a texture inside the image that might be useful if we were healing inside the hair or something like that, usually however the results are pretty terrible. And then we have proximity match which is going to repeat pixels in the shape of your brush stroke. And it's going to keep the pixels arranged in the same manner they were in the first place. I'm going to show you how that works with a different tool called the healing brush. But if you're going to be using the spot healing brush, the one we have selected now, then content aware is almost always the way to go. All right, I'm going to go ahead and zoom in on this girl's nose right here. And I'll increase the size of my brush by pressing the right bracket key a few times. And here I'm talking about the square bracket keys to the right of the P as in pole key on a US keyboard. And now I can just go ahead and do one of two things. You can either just click with the tool. And I'm going to click and hold for a moment so that you can see that we're just seeing this darkness inside the brush. And that's because Photoshop doesn't know exactly what pixels it's going to source yet. What pixels it's going to repeat in other words from throughout the image. It's going to determine that in just a moment when I release and it's going to base that information on the pixels that are surrounding my brush. So the pixels around the perimeter. And then it's going to heal everything together so that the results match, after I release like so, and you can see that it does a fairly miraculous job, all things considered. And so that's one option, is to just click with the tool and that tends to work pretty darn well, by the way. Notice if I reduce the size of my cursor by a little bit by pressing the left bracket key and then click right there, that I healed that little mole away and I can do the same thing over here. So you want to keep your brush small. You don't want to have a big clumsy brush and you don't necessarily want to be brushing all over the place either. Although in this case, that worked out pretty well. And I might have to do that in order to heal this stuff right there. And that is at least the basics of working with Photoshop's foremost retouching tool the spot healing brush.

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