Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [185]
Once you understand the fundamental principles that lie behind the workings of the healing brush, you will come to understand why it is that the healing brush may sometimes fail to work as expected. You see, if the healing brush is applied too close to an edge where there is a sudden shift in tonal lightness, it will attempt to create a blend with what is immediately outside the healing brush area. So when you retouch with the healing brush you need to be mindful of this intended behavior. However, there are things you can do to address this. For example, you can create a selection that defines the area you are about to start retouching and constrain the healing brush work so that it is carried out inside the selection area only (see the example shown on page 425).
1.
I selected the healing brush from the Tools panel and selected a hard-edged brush from the Options bar. The brush blending mode was set to ‘Normal’, the Source button set to ‘Sampled’ and the Aligned box left unchecked.
2.
Before using the healing brush, I again added a new empty layer and made sure the Sample options were set to ‘All Layers’ or ‘Current & Below’. I -clicked to define the source point, which in this example was an area of clean skin texture, and was now ready to carry out the retouching. Here, I simply clicked on the blemishes to remove them with the healing brush. If you are using a pressure sensitive tablet such as a Wacom™ tablet, the default brush dynamics will be size sensitive, so you can use light pressure to paint with a small brush, and heavier pressure to apply a full-sized brush.
3.
I continued using the healing brush to complete the initial skin tone retouching.
Choosing an appropriate alignment mode
I usually find it is more convenient to use the clone stamp tool in aligned mode and the healing brush in non-aligned mode (Figure 8.4). This is because when you use the clone stamp you can preserve the relationship between the source and destination points, apply a few clones, then sample a new source point as you continue cloning over other parts of the photograph. You can even clone data from a separate document (as shown in Figure 8.5).
Figure 8.4 When you have the clone stamp tool selected and the Aligned box in the tool Options bar is unchecked, the source point remains static and each application of the clone stamp makes a copy of the image data from the same original source point.
Figure 8.5 In this example you can see how I was able to sample the sky from one image window and copy it to another separate image using the clone stamp. I just -clicked with the clone stamp in the source (sky) image, then selected the other image window and clicked to establish a cloning relationship between the source and destination image windows.
Aligned or non-aligned cloning?
When the source area is unrestricted I suggest you choose the aligned mode for the clone stamp tool. However, when the source area is restricted and you don't want to pick up from other surrounding areas, choose non-aligned.
If you try to use the clone stamp over an area where there is a gentle change in tonal gradation, it will be almost impossible to disguise the retouching work, unless the point you are sampling from and destination point match exactly in tone and color. It is in these situations that you are usually better off using the healing brush. For most healing brush work I suggest you use the non-aligned mode (which happens to be the default setting for this tool). This allows you to choose a source point that contains the optimum texture information with which to repair a particular section of a photograph. You can