> PHOTOSHOP USER>^ FEBRUARY 2017[0 54 ]
RE-MASTERING THE HEALING BRUSH TOOLS IN
PHOTOSHOP: DE-MYSTIFYING THE DIFFUSION SLIDER
I’ll start right off and warn you, this is not a “sexy” subject, but if you’ve ever retouched a face in
Adobe Photoshop, you need to learn about this topic. It will tremendously alleviate lots of retouching
frustrations, and anything I can do to help you not be discouraged when it comes to using Photoshop
is considered a “win” in my book.Portrait retouchers, like myself, rely heavily on the Healing
Brush, Spot Healing Brush, and Patch tools. Back when Photo
shop 2015 was released, it came with a new upgrade to these
tools, and Adobe boasted about the improvements they made
to them. They promoted the fact that they had enhanced the
mercury performance of these tools to make them 120 times
faster than their older versions. They also included a new
effect that would show you the realtime results of what the
heal/patch would look like if you were to release your mouse
or pen at that exact moment.
While Adobe did take the time to try and describe this
enhancement on their website, unless you’re an engineer,
I wouldn’t necessarily recommend reading it. Here’s an
excerpt about the new tools’ enhancement:
“The new healing algorithm is better in diffusing the
color and spreading them over an area. However, you
need to be very clear about the area being sampled
or filled. For soft selection, Photoshop thresholds
the soft selection at 128 to display an 8bit mask.
As a result, the screen feedback in patch tool can
misrepresent what [the] user is actually sampling
or trying to heal. This can manifest itself in bright
or dark color contamination at the boundary of the
filled area, which will be spread over the filled area.DIFFUSION SLIDER HISTORY
Before we move on, a little history: While the effect was
cool, it totally changed the end product and the way the
tools removed the spots that users were trying to eliminate.
Portrait and beauty retouchers all over the world started
complaining because they couldn’t use the tools anymore
for their retouching work—they gave a smudgy appearance
to all the areas that had been healed! Retouchers went as
far as to revert to using the previous version of Photoshop to
temporarily fix this problem!
So what did Adobe do about it? The response may make
you cock your head to the side a little. Adobe suggested the
user create a text (.txt) file and save it within Photoshop’s pref
erences folders. You would choose which “legacy” version of
the healing brush you’d like to go back to, and depending on
which one it was, you’d type a 0, 1, or 2 in the text file. I’m
sorry, Adobe, but most of your users would sooner be struck
by lightning, then go through this trouble to try to “patch”
this problem in this way. (See what I did there?) Thankfully,
this nonsense didn’t last too long. With the Adobe Photoshop
CC 2015.1 release came the advent of the Diffusion slider. If
I had to boil down the definition of what this slider setting
does to its most direct meaning, it means: how much Photo
shop looks at the surrounding area when removing a blemish.The new algorithm is enhanced to deal with very soft
brushes. To limit the contamination, you may want
to try different diffusion slider values and be careful
with the sampling region.”
I don’t know about you, but that might as well be written
in Greek! I think probably only about 5% of Photoshop users
can truly follow this and understand it. So, in this article, I’m
hoping to shed light on this feature using language that
everyone can understand.In my experience, the higher the Diffusion slider setting,
the less Photoshop cares about matching the healed area to
the surrounding pixels in your image. This may be because
lower slider values are meant for images with noise, grain, and
fine details, while high values are better for smoother areas
of images, like skies and walls. Since I’m a portrait retoucher,
I deal with faces. I think the reason I’m a little bit partial to the
lower slider values is because Photoshop regards pore struc
ture as “fine detail/texture.”KRISTINASHERK
Retouching Magic
KRISTINASHERK
Retouching Magic