Spot Healing in Adobe Photoshop CS2, Part 3

Tutorial: Page (2) of 2 - 06/14/05

Spot Healing in Adobe Photoshop CS2, Part 3 Removing wires, rigs and other objects from an image For the remainder, we don't want to use a spiraling stroke because we'll pick up a part of the show in the proximity match. Instead, we'll use a series of choppy horizontal strokes and simple dabs of the brush to finish it off.

For the horizontal wire, the process is similar. Start toward the middle of the wire and work your way outward in spiraling strokes. Do this for each side of the wire, and then finish off the center of the wire in spiraling strokes as well, making sure that you vary the tightness of the spiral to bring variation into the reconstructed background.

When you're done, you can also touch up any portions of the image that seem to show repeating patterns by drawing squiggles over those areas or by dabbing the Spot Healing brush into those areas.

One note about this technique: It will work well for still images, but not for rotoscoping (video), since each frame's background would be reconstructed differently, resulting in obvious visual artifacts.

Removing larger objects
Finally, there will also be times when you'll need to remove much larger objects from your image, objects that may take up 20 percent or more of your the area of your image. This is a much more tricky situation and probably better suited for Alien Skin's Smart Fill filter. However, it can be accomplished, through trial and error, with Photoshop's Spot Healing brush.

Here, for example, I've removed the entire subject from the bungee jumping image I used earlier.

This was accomplished by first tackling the subject's extremities and then working my way inward. The movie below shows how the strokes were applied in the first part of the process--working inward with squiggly, short strokes and trying to follow the contours of the background surrounding the subject.

What you'll notice happened was that in the process I actually managed to sample portions of the subject back into the subject--particularly color. A second touch-up pass with the Spot Healing brush--dabbing away small flaws and adding in some random strokes to take care of any repeating patterns in the background fill--takes care of the texture aspect of the object replacement. But some of the original color of the subject still remains. This I'll eliminate by going up into the top Tool Options bar and setting the Mode of the Spot Healing brush from "Normal" to "Color." And, in this mode, I can simply paint over the color flaws in the image to get rid of reds and blues and replace them with surrounding colors, but without affecting the texture of the fill.

And that's all there is to it. If you have any further questions about the Spot Healing brush--or about Photoshop in general--be sure to visit me in our Adobe Photoshop forum by clicking here.

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