Spot Healing in Adobe Photoshop CS2

Tutorial: Page (1) of 2 - 06/02/05

Spot Healing in Adobe Photoshop CS2 Part 1: Simple blemish removal By Dave Nagel Forget the Clone tool and Healing brush for blemish removal. The latest advance in this process is the new Spot Healing brush introduced in Photoshop CS2. Designed as a sort of one-click quick fix, the Spot Healing brush is, nevertheless, an extremely powerful tool that will allow you not only to clean up simple flaws in your subject, but also resurface large, complex areas and even remove objects altogether from your images.

I'm dividing this tutorial into three parts to cover separately what are, essentially, three separate functions of the Spot Healing brush: simple blemish removal, complex resurfacing and object removal. In this first installment, we'll cover simple blemish removal, along with some tips for fine tuning the process when you run into trouble. In the next installment, we'll look at techniques for working with far more complex problems that might involve drastic resurfacing. Then, in the final installment, we'll work on an even more invasive procedure involving removing entire objects from photographs (say, for example, a car that has driven into your otherwise perfect nature photo).

Simple blemish removal
The Spot Healing brush, as its name implies, was designed to remove ... well ... spots. And this means, of course, things like acne or other types of blemishes that your clients (or family members) might not want to see on their permanent record. Here's a rundown of the process.

1. To begin, select the Spot Healing brush in the Tools palette.

2. The options for the brush will appear in the top Tool Options bar. The default settings will generally work best for this sort of operation, with the mode set to "Normal" and the Type set to "Proximity Match." But make sure that your brush is not overly large. Keep it to a maximum of about 50 pixels, and give it a soft edge, something along the lines of what you see below.

3. Then, finally, you're going to click the brush onto the blemished area, or draw a little squiggle over it. The image below shows the blemish I'm going to remove.

Then I paint over that blemish.

And voila! It's gone.

And that's the basic process for removing a simple blemish. I can continue this process to remove other blemishes from the image as well, dabbing or drawing then lines over the blemishes in the process.

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