Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers Tutorials
Brush Tools / Healing Brushes
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers / Brush Tools / Healing Brushes)
The Healing Brushes are very similar to the Clone Tool but instead of copying pixels identically, they copy the texture from the source and blend the color with the color of the problematic area. Let's look at this demo sample image to see the differences between the Healing Brushes and the Clone Tool. First I'll use the Clone Tool. I'll begin by Alt or Option clicking on this area and then releasing the cursor, moving it and then left clicking and dragging as usual and I copy the pixels exactly. Similarly, if I sample the blue area and I come over from the pattern, I can copy it exactly. I'm going to come over here and select the basic Healing Brush Tool. I'll Alt or Option click to set the source, just as I did with the Clone Stamp Too, release it, move the cursor over to the area where I want to fix using the Healing Brush and I'll left click and drag. Initially it looks like the results are going to be identical to the Clone Stamp Tool; however, when I release the left click of the cursor and it processes the change, you can see that the texture has been copied and the color has been blended. Similarly, if I set the blue smooth area as the source for the healing brush, move my cursor over the patterned area and drag, after it processes it has copied the smooth texture and blended the color. This can actually be very helpful in creating natural looks in backgrounds that are not overly detailed. Sometimes near high-contrast edges the Healing Brush can create some unexpected results and in those cases you might want to switch to the Clone Stamp Tool or you can position your bush so that it covers both sides of the high-contrast edge and then move it down and you can see that we got a little better result doing that. The Spot Healing Brush is a version of the Healing Brush that's a little bit newer and it chooses the source automatically. You skip the Alt Option click step and just click and drag over the problematic area and Photoshop automatically analyzes the nearby pixels and copies the texture and blends the color accordingly. You can see that with a single click and drag, I'm able to repair these areas that I quote fixed earlier. Now, in the textured area, it's going to have a little bit more difficulty in this very detailed area but it still does a very reasonable job. The Spot Healing Brush can be a huge timesaver when removing dust, particularly from non-detailed backgrounds. And as with the Healing Brush, be aware that sometimes the results can be a bit unpredictable near high-contrast edges and in such cases, again, you may choose to use the Clone Stamp Tool to get a better result but also clicking directly over an edge can be helpful but as you can see, it's giving me some funny results right now so that in this area I would be better off using the Clone Stamp Tool. Let's look at this image and look at doing some dust cleanup. I've already zoomed into a hundred percent and you can see that there's quite a bit of dust in this image. This is from an older camera with a very dirty sensor. We'll begin by adding a new layer to do the cleanup on and then I've got the Spot Healing Brush selected but it's way too large so I'll use my Bracket Key to make it smaller. Normally I would begin in one corner of the image and work my way across, just with a little click, little click and drag with the Spot Healing Brush, I can clean up a lot of these dust spots pretty well. That one was not quite as good a job. With click and drag it's still having problems there. In that case, it might be much better to use the Clone Stamp Tool. Notice it's still loaded with the other pixels from the other image so I'll Alt click to set it, come over here, click and drag and it's done a little bit better job. But it takes longer than using the Spot Healing Brush. It's a good idea to learn the shortcuts for the different tools so that you can go back and forth between them quickly. For the Spot Healing Brush, the shortcut is J and for the Clone Tool it's S. Getting comfortable with the Clone Stamp Tool as well as both Healing Brushes will enable you to clean up your images efficiently while leaving little evidence behind that you were there. Each of the tools is similar but slightly different and as you work in your images, you'll find that one is more suited for the job than another.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers |
| Author: | Ellen Anon |
| SKU: | 34036 |
| ISBN: | 1-935320-74-2 |
| Release Date: | 2009-09-23 |
| Duration: | 8.5 hrs / 112 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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