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So it's all pretty easy. But there are times when you will run into troubles. Here's how you deal with them.
Fine tuning the Spot Healing process
There are two common problems--common for me, anyway--that are likely to crop up when you're using the Spot Healing brush, even on simple blemishes like the ones we've dealth with so far.
The first and more annoying of these problems when using the Proximity Match type of operation is inadvertently introducing artifacts into the healed area. For example, let's say I'm working on my original blemish, and I manage to bring in a part of the eyelashes, like so.
This can happen for two reasons. The first is that your brush is set to too large a size, so it's sampling a larger area around the section you're healing. To fix this, either ease up on the pen pressure to make the brush smaller, or manually set the brush to a smaller size up in the top Tool Options bar. (This is also where you set pen pressure to control the size of the brush.)
The second option for fixing this is to change the direction of your stroke. And the reason for this is that the Spot Healing brush will adjust the proximity based on the starting point and/or direction of the stroke. So, if you start the stroke away from the element that's being introduced into the healed area and move the stroke toward it--in my example, I'd move the healing stroke toward the offending eyelash--then that element won't be sampled by the Spot Healing brush, and hence it won't be introduced as an artifact into the area you're trying to heal.
Sometimes, of course, you'll want to use a combination of these two solutions--both a smaller brush and a change in the direction of the stroke. And sometimes you'll want to draw your stroke as a squiggle to help randomize the proximity a bit, if nothing else works.
The second problem you'll encounter when using the Spot Healing brush is a blurring of the healed area, as in the example below.
This can happen for a couple of reasons as well. The first, once again, is when you use a brush that's too large. And I generally find this to be the case with brush sizes larger than 50 pixels, although this certainly isn't a fixed limitation. What I've found is that this issue is primarily based on the resolution of the source image. As a rule of thumb, stick to a brush size that's 50 pixels per 72 PPI of image resolution. If your image is 144 PPI, you could probably get away with a brush up to 100 pixels in diameter. If your image is 288 PPI, you could get away with a brush that's 200 pixels in diameter.
Or thereabouts.
The other cause of this problem will be the length of your stroke with the Spot healing brush. Keep your stokes short and choppy. If you have to cover a large blemish, use multiple short strokes. Otherwise you're likely to wind up with a blurred result.
Okay, so what if the blemishes in your image are so concentrated that no combination of these techniques will work? After all, if the entire surface of the subject's face is flawed, there is no clean area for the Spot Healing brush to sample, so rather than removing blemishes, you'll just be spreading them around and rearranging them. This is the problem we'll look at in Part 2 of this tutorial series.
If you have any questions in the meantime, be sure to drop me a line or post your question in our Adobe Photoshop forum by clicking here.
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