- Heal the small mark to the right of her nose. Set
the brush diameter to 20 pixels. Then zoom in on
the right side of her face (your right, her left). Click
once on the small mark, as shown in Figure 4-21.
Photoshop dims the affected pixels, as illustrated
by the left image in the figure. After you release the
mouse button, the program blends the source—
which it derives automatically from some other
portion of the image—with the area around the
brushstroke. The result is a patch.
The success of the patch hinges on the accuracy
of the automatically chosen source. The tool may
select a good source or a bad one. And which it
will do is anyone’s guess. Your patch may look
seamless, or it may contain a bit of detail that’s
inappropriate. Due to the smooth face of our
subject and the good detail in the photograph,
the spot healing brush works well in this case.
PeaRl Of WISDOmThe spot healing brush is vastly improved in CS5, especially
if you choose the Content-Aware setting in the options
bar. This setting uses a calculation similar to one we saw in
Lesson 2 with the content-aware fill. Although improved,
the spot healing brush is no competition for the healing
brush proper.
- Select the healing brush in the toolbox. Next,
we’ll turn our attention to that small mark on
Patchy’s face on the far right side of the image.
Click the spot healing icon to bring up a flyout
menu, and choose the healing brush, as shown
in Figure 4-22. Or press the J key (Shift+J if you
skipped the Preface). Unlike the spot healing
brush, the healing brush allows you to specify
the source point from which Photoshop will grab
its healing information. - Confirm the default settings. In the options
bar, make sure Source is set to Sampled and the
Aligned check box is off. Sampled tells Photo-
shop to clone pixels from a spot inside an image
(as you’ll specify in the next step); turning off
Aligned lets you clone several times in a row from
that one pristine spot. Figure 4-22.
Figure 4-21.Healing and Patching 105