healing and Patching
The edit tools are well suited to a wide variety of retouch-
ing scenarios. But they can’t create detail where none ex-
ists. To fix dust and scratches or cover up blemishes and
wrinkles, you need tools that can paint imagery on top of
imagery. Tools like the healing brushes and patch tool:- The healing brushes paint one section of an image,
called the source, onto another. One variety of the
healing brush lets you specify a source; the other finds
a source automatically. As the tool clones the source
detail, it mixes it with the color and lighting that sur-
rounds the brushstroke, thereby mending the offend-
ing detail seamlessly. - The patch tool clones like the healing brushes. But in-
stead of painting with the tool, you select areas of an
image as you would with the lasso.
The following exercise shows you how to use these power-
ful tools to fix a variety of image challenges on the sweetly
scowling face of a young pirate.
- Open a photograph requiring detail retouch-
ing. Open the file called Patchy.tif located in
the Lesson 04 folder inside Lesson Files-PsCS5
1on1. This photo of a ten-year-old girl dressed up as a
pirate, shown in Figure 4-19, comes from Simone van
den Berg of the Fotolia image library. While children
don’t generally have the same kinds of skin flaws that
we older folks do, Patchy has a few spots on which to
test our healing skills, not to mention a suspicious bit
of food on the corner of her mouth and a wicked scar
on her cheek. - Select the spot healing brush in the toolbox. The spot
healing brush is the default occupant of the healing tool
slot. But if you’re performing this step on the heels of
the last exercise, you’ll need to select it from the flyout
menu (see Figure 4-20) or Alt-click (Option-click) the
red eye tool icon in the toolbox. True to its mission,
the spot healing brush looks like a band-aid next to a
little circular marquee that represents the spot. I don’t
recommend the spot healing brush tool very often,
which is why you’ll find, if you loaded my shortcuts in
the Preface, that I did away with its shortcut.
Figure 4-19.
Figure 4-20.104 Lesson 4: Retouch, Heal, and Enhance