To begin with, you establish a sample point by Option/Alt-clicking on the portion of the image you wish to sample from. So although it is similar to the clone stamp, you will need to take these differences into account and adapt the way you work with it. However, it is important to stress that the healing brush is more than just a super clone stamp and it has its own unique characteristics. The healing brush is used in the same way as the clone stamp tool. The basic principle is that the texture from the sample area is blended with the color and luminosity surrounding wherever you paint.įigure 5 The healing brush Options bar. The healing brush enables you to clone areas from an image and blend the pixels from the sampled area seamlessly with the target area (the healing brush Options bar is shown below in Figure 5). The spot healing brush is the default healing tool in Photoshop, so the first time you select it and try to use the Option/Alt keys to establish a source point to sample from, you will be shown a warning dialog explaining there is no need to create a sample source for the spot healing brush and offers you the option to switch to using the normal healing brush instead. You can see here the various modes available for the spot healing brush. I also find that you can disguise the retouching better by adding extra, thin light strokes 90° to the angle of the first, main brush stroke and this too can help disguise your retouching work with the spot healing brush used in this mode.įigure 3 This shows a before version (top) and after version (bottom), where I had used the spot healing brush in Content-Aware mode to retouch this photo.įigure 4 The spot healing brush Options bar with the Content-Aware mode selected. You’ll discover that dragging the brush from different directions can also influence the outcome of the heal blend retouching and you may sometimes need to carry out an undo and reapply the brush stroke differently and keep doing this until you get the best result. I find that you need to be quite patient and note carefully the result of each brush stroke before applying the next. When retouching the rocks I applied much shorter brush strokes using the Replace blend mode to gradually removed the cables bit by bit (see the blend modes shown in Figure 4). I also mostly used long, continuous brush strokes to remove these from the photograph and achieve a smooth blended result with the rest of the sky. To start with I found that the Normal blend mode worked best for retouching the cables that overlapped the sky, since this blend mode uses diffuse edges to blend seamlessly with the surroundings. Although the end result was quite effective I should point out that you do still have to apply a certain amount of skill in your brush work and choice of settings in order to use this tool effectively. By using the spot healing brush in content-aware mode I was able to carefully remove all of these to produce the finished photo shown beneath the original. In the Figure 3 example below there were a lot of electric cables and wires in the original photograph that spoiled the view. Let’s now look at what the spot healing brush is capable of when used in this mode. The spot healing brush also features a Content-Aware mode which intelligently works out how best to fill the areas you retouch when you use the spot healing brush. This will give the spot healing brush a better clue as to which areas to sample. It is a good idea when using this tool to retouch larger areas, for the brush direction to be coming from the side that contains the most suitable texture to sample from. And because the brush is intelligently looking around for the good pixel data to sample from it is best to apply brush strokes that drag inwards from the side where the best source data exists (see Figure 2).įigure 2 In Proximity Match mode, the spot healing brush works by searching automatically to find the best pixels to sample from to carry out a repair. You can use the spot healing brush in this mode to click away and zap small blemishes, but when you are repairing larger areas in a picture you will usually obtain better results if the brush size used is smaller than the defective area. It then uses the pixel data that has been sampled in this way to replace the defective pixels beneath where you are painting. The Proximity Match mode analyzes the data, around the area where you are painting, to identify the best area to sample the pixel information from. The spot healing tool has three basic modes of operation (see Figure 1 for the spot healing brush tool Options bar). Figure 1 The spot healing brush Options bar.
0 kommentar(er)
