Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [187]
Better healing edges
Since the healing brush blends the cloned source data with the edges that surround the destination point, you can improve the efficiency of the healing brush by increasing the outer circumference size for the healing brush cursor. The following technique came via Russell Brown, who informs me that he was shown how to do this by an attendee at one of his seminars.
If you change the healing brush to an elliptical shape, you will tend to produce a more broken-up edge to your healing work and this can sometimes produce an improved healing blend (Figure 8.6). There are two explanations for why this works. Firstly, a narrow elliptical brush cursor has a longer perimeter. This means that more pixels are likely to be sampled when calculating the healing blend. The second thing you will notice is that when the healing brush is more elliptical, a randomness is introduced into the angle of the brush. Try changing the shape of the brush in the way I describe below and as you paint, you will see what I mean.
Figure 8.6 To adjust the shape and hardness of the healing brush, select the healing brush tool and mouse down on the brush options in the tools Options bar. Set the Hardness to 100% and drag the elliptical handles to make the brush shape more elliptical. Notice also that if you are using a Wacom™ tablet or other pressure sensitive input device, the brush size is linked by default to the amount of pen pressure applied.
1.
The healing brush is a perfect retouching tool to use when you are faced with the challenge of retouching blemishes where the sky contains gentle transitions of tone going from dark to light. It used to be extremely difficult to retouch shots like this when all you had to work with was the clone stamp tool, but not so with the healing brush.
2.
One potential problem that can arise is when you wish to retouch a blemish that is adjacent to a sudden change in lightness or color. In this picture you can see that even if I were to use the healing brush with a small, hard-edged brush, as I brushed closer to the roof the healing brush would pick up the dark edge and this would result in the darker pixels bleeding into the healing brush cloned area.
3.
One answer to the problem would be to make a pre-selection of the area I wished to heal (with maybe some minimal feathering) and thereby restrict the extent to which the healing brush tool was able to analyze the surrounding pixels. The other alternative would be to switch to working with the clone stamp tool when retouching close to edges like this. Having said this, the new Content-Aware mode for the spot healing brush does now make it easier to cope with these types of retouching problems (see pages 430–431).
Spot healing brush
The spot healing brush may not be quite so versatile as the healing brush, but it is in many ways a lot easier to use. The spot healing brush is also the default healing tool in Photoshop. The first time you select it and try to use the keys to establish a source point to sample from, you will be shown a warning dialog explaining there is no need to create a sample source for the spot healing brush and offering you the option to switch to using the normal healing brush instead. To use the spot healing brush just click on the marks or blemishes you wish to remove. The spot healing brush then automatically samples the replacement pixel data from around the area you are trying to heal.
The spot healing brush tool has three basic modes of operation (Figure 8.8). In Proximity Match mode it analyzes the data around the area where you are painting to identify the best area to sample the pixel information from. It then uses the pixel data that has been sampled in this way to replace the defective pixels beneath where you are painting. You can use the spot healing brush to click away and zap small blemishes, but when you are repairing larger areas in a picture you