Healing Tools

Healing Tools

Yes…I’m sort of a Star Wars nerd! I couldn’t help but use the above graphic for this post! The last two posts were pretty intense (or at the very least really long) so I thought I’d let your brain “recover” a bit with this less intense post on healing tools 😉

I’m fairly certain you’ve run across a photo or two over the years that could benefit from a little re-touching. You know the ones; an adorable smile with an untimely missing tooth, a tattoo that you’d rather not see in a wedding photo, an unfortunate blemish on prom night, dark circles under eyes…we’ve all had them! Some of these are easier than others to “correct”.

Art Is Healing

The healing tools available in Photoshop Elements (PSE) are very good when you need the re-touching effects that they provide. The main difference between the Healing Brush and Clone Stamp tools is that when re-touching with the Healing Brush, the tool attempts to match the tonality of the underlying area with what you are cloning, so you may see the cloned area’s tonality adjust.

The Clone Stamp clones exact information. In other words, what you see is what you get. Sometimes you need a little more precision, like when adding missing teeth in a smile.

So which one is better? That’s kind of where the “war” starts! Read on…

The “Clone” Wars

Cloning & Healing

A lot of people get confused by the two main “Healing Tools” at our disposal in PSE. While they both have similar uses, there is a difference in how these tools get the job done.

Both tools let you select a sampling point. This is the part of the image you want to use to “paint over” distractions or blemishes. The Healing Brush Tool keeps the highlights and shadows of wherever you’re painting and only paints the color of your sampling area.

The clone stamp paints a complete copy of whatever you select. The Clone Stamp tool is much more suitable for areas with defined edges, since the Healing Brush will tend to blur the color and you’ll end up with messy, smudged edges.

The single biggest difference between the Clone Stamp tool and the Healing Brush is that the Healing Brush does the painting with a lot more intelligence than the Clone Stamp tool. Instead of just dropping the pixels from the sample area onto the flaw you’re correcting, the Healing Brush uses the texture of the sampled area and applies the tonal characteristics of the area around the flaw. You still need to sample an area with the same basic color as the area around the flaw, but you needn’t worry about matching the color exactly, as you must do with the Clone tool.

Sometimes the Clone Stamp works better than the Healing Brush, and sometimes the Healing Brush works best. Experimentation is the key!

And there’s one option for both the Clone Stamp and the Healing Brush that always stirs up a bit of discussion. The option of “Sampled” or “Pattern”. Choosing “Pattern,” lets you choose a Pattern from the Pattern picker. Generally, not something I’m looking to do when re-touching a photo. So I’m never sure when (or why) people use this option.

Then there’s the Spot Healing Brush. The main difference between this and the standard Healing Brush is that the Spot Healing Brush requires no source point. You simply click on the blemishes you want to get rid of (or drag with the tool to paint over the larger areas you wish to repair) and the Spot Healing Brush works out the rest for you.

Did I achieve a cease-fire in this war…nope. It all just depends on what you’re trying to re-touch. And everyone seems to have their favorite, go-to tool! In my opinion…they each have their place.

Spot Healing Brush

Apple - Worm Hole

This is the ideal tool for removing small problem areas from photos, like blemishes and stray hairs in a portrait or sensor spots (caused by small pieces of debris sticking to the sensor of your camera) in a landscape. It’s fully automated, so you simply have to paint over the problem and let the tool do the rest. It’s most effective in areas where the mark is against an otherwise clean backdrop, like skin or a clear sky.

To me, the spot healing tool is used for very small areas in very simple backgrounds. No reference point is needed – all you do is grab the tool/brush and paint over the area. It creates a blend from the surrounding area in order to “heal” the imperfection. Actually, pretty much the way your skin heals after a wound. But again, only in small, isolated areas.

Let’s look at that “bad apple” photo from Pixabay shown above. I’m fairly certain all I need to do is grab the Spot Healing Brush for this one:

Spot Healing Brush Options

Not too many options here. I’m not sure what the default is for Type but I almost always select content aware (more on that a bit further down). And I generally don’t select the Sample All Layers option. Selecting this option allows PSE to select a sample area based on all visible layers not just the contents of the selected layer. Typically, I’ll only have one layer when working on a photo so it won’t hurt anything if that option is selected.

With Content Aware selected and a nice hard round brush. I set the size of the brush to 400 pixels as this will cover the entire worm hole. When I click & hold over the worm hole, I see a semi-transparent circle over that worm hole:

Round Brush Over Worm Hole

When I release the mouse button…no more worm hole:

Apple No Worm Hole #1

Is it perfect? Not exactly but I think it’s close enough. If I use a smaller brush size, say around 100 pixels vs. the 400 pixels I used…I can make multiple swipes with the brush and end up with something that looks a bit better, perhaps more natural:

Apple No Worm Hole #2

It’s hard to see a whole lot of difference. But it just goes to show that simply brushing over the “blemish” can clean things up pretty well.

Content aware is the heavy lifter here. Content aware does some pattern recognition of the surrounding area and tries to fill the “brushed over” area with the simplest possible pattern that it can synthesize. But a complication arises when the algorithm used by PSE chooses information from unwanted areas. Then it just gets messy. Which is sort of what happened with the single-click attempt above with the worm hole.

If you know what you’re looking at you can see what looks like a fairly perfect circle where the worm hole used to be. On the other hand…if you’d never seen the original photo you’d likely be none the wiser!

It can slip up even more when the problem is on a more detailed backdrop – at this point, switch to the Clone tool or Healing Brush. Both of these let you target a sample area.

Note: Using a soft brush rather than a hard brush can change the result. I’d encourage you to experiment with each and see which meets your needs best.

Healing Brush

Older Woman - Wrinkles

In addition to the Spot Healing Brush tool, PSE also offers the Healing Brush tool. This tool works in the same manner as the Clone Stamp tool. However, the Healing Brush allows you to sample textures from one area of the photo and apply them to another area blending them seamlessly into the new location, effectively fixing imperfections without altering the color of the photo. It is particularly useful for repairing areas with complex textures or patterns.

The Healing Brush is designed to help you remove flaws from an image, such as scratches in a photo, age lines in a person’s face or even remove unwanted objects from the photo. You essentially paint the flawed area with pixels that you pick up from another part of the image (i.e. click on a part of the area not “blemished”). For example, if a person has wrinkles at the edges of his or her eyes, you can sample an area of skin on the forehead that has no such flaws. When you paint over the wrinkles, you cover the blemish. It’s a technique that has been used by Clone-tool jockeys for years.

Let’s look at that “older woman” photo from Pixabay shown above. This is a perfect photo for the Healing Brush:

Healing Brush Options

PSE looks at the sampled area you have chosen, and analyzes the pixels within a feathered radius of 10% of that area, taking into account texture, color, and luminosity. For this reason, using a soft-edged brush is not required, or even available, when using the Healing Brush.

I generally don’t need to do anything with Brush settings (other than size). The Brush Settings option is for changing settings for Hardness, Spacing & Roundness. When re-touching a photo these typically won’t apply.

I leave the Aligned box unchecked. Align forces the starting point to follow the cursor, even after completing a stroke. Keeping that option turned off starts the sample point back to its original location at the start of each stroke. This probably sounds confusing. Just know that for most re-touching with this tool…we want to leave this unchecked.

For Source I have the option of “Sampled” or “Pattern”. If I choose “Pattern,” I can choose a Pattern from the Pattern picker. As I mentioned earlier, not something I’m looking to do when re-touching a photo. So, I typically leave this option set to “Sampled.”

I can change the “blend” Mode, but I typically keep this set to Normal. Playing around with different modes can be interesting if you want to see what they do. But again, not a typical thing when working with a photo.

Clone Overlay, this is an odd but important option (at least in my opinion):

Clone Overlay

I’m not 100% certain what the defaults are here but I’m fairly confident that what you see above are the defaults. Having the Show Overlay option selected shows the source area that has been selected floating over the original image. This allows you to see precisely how the source area aligns with the original. This option helps tremendously with the healing process and I would encourage you to keep this option set as shown above.

If you’ve never “sampled” from an image before I believe your default overlay will just be a blank circle. And if you find that a “loaded” overlay is distracting and you prefer not to see it, just uncheck the Show Overlay box.

Again, Sample All Layers typically isn’t applicable when editing a photo.

Now to “heal” this photo. I want to remove (or at least soften) the wrinkles around her eye. All I have to do is select a brush size that will be adequate to select a good portion of “unwrinkled” skin but not too big for the area I want to re-touch. I ended up using a brush size of 200 pixels. As with the apple photo above, a semi-transparent circle of some fashion will appear wherever I place it over my photo.

Then I select a portion of her cheek that doesn’t have any wrinkles by positioning my cursor and pressing Alt+Click. This loads that area into my brush and all I have to do is drag my brush over the wrinkles and I get this:

Older Woman - Less Wrinkles

This was a fairly small area to re-touch. In larger areas you may need to complete the repair process in stages.

Could I have done the same thing with the Spot Healing Brush? Not anywhere near as cleanly as I did here. But that doesn’t mean you can’t try the Spot Healing Brush first!

One more quick look at another re-touch using the Healing Brush. Let’s look at this “meadow” photo from Pixabay:

Girl In Meadow

Using the Healing Brush tool, I can fairly quickly remove that girl and be left with just a meadow:

Meadow No Girl

One more quick example:

Llama Teeth - Llama No Teeth

Notice the teeth visible on the llama at the left? See how they’re missing on the llama at the right? Just one more example of how the healing brush can be used! As you can see, using this tool you can really quickly and easily clean up just about any imperfections in your photo. Even if you’re a complete PSE novice you can get to “healing” and have your images looking pixel perfect in no time.

Clone Stamp Tool

Image WIth Text

I use this tool A LOT. It is such a handy little feature. You can remove electrical sockets, parts of a window frame, entire trees and even people! I know…I already did that with the Healing Brush. But with the Clone Stamp it’s a bit different. I find this tool particularly useful if I’m try to remove unwanted text from an image.

In simple terms, the Clone Stamp tool is little more than a copy-and-paste tool. It works in a similar way to a word-processing application, where you might copy and paste a paragraph of text from one part of a document to another, except in this case it’s copying pixels from your image.

Clone Stamp Options

You can see that the options here are similar to that of the Healing Brush (other than their placement). The only options missing from the Clone Stamp are Source & Mode.

I generally use a soft round brush, set it to the desired size and just as with the Healing Brush, I don’t change any of the other Brush Settings.

Now as opposed to what I did with the Healing Brush, I will check the Aligned box. Remember what I said above…Aligned forces the starting point to follow the cursor. With this tool I typically (though not always) do want the sample point to “follow” as I click & move over the image.

Again, as with the Healing Brush we have the Clone Overlay option I would encourage you to keep this option set as shown above with the Healing Brush. And as mentioned earlier, Sample All Layers typically isn’t applicable when editing a photo.

Note: The Clone Stamp Tool and the Healing Brush share the Overlay option, i.e., whichever settings you select for one tool will apply to the other one. If you made changes using the Healing Brush, be sure to adjust them as needed when using the Clone Stamp.

Let’s take another look at the image at the top of this section (from my stash not sure from where):

Image With Text

I love the photo but would prefer it without the words. I tried using the Healing Brush but it just didn’t work out as nicely as I’d hoped (at least not in my opinion). I have found that in a lot of cases I have much better luck with the Clone Stamp tool when I’m trying to get rid of text in an image.

Just as with the Healing Brush tool I first need to identify a source area by pressing Alt+Click to “load” the desired portion of the image. Then while holding down the left-click button I move the cursor over the area in which I want to place (clone) the selected area. Here’s what it looks like as I place that “cloned” section over the words:

Clone Source Loaded

I then just click (paste) that loaded selection right over the word. Because I’m using a soft round brush it may take a few clicks to get the desired “coverage”. Then I just move and click across the words until I have the desired look. Here’s what it looks like after a few clicks:

Text Partially Cloned Away

Because I have selected the Aligned option, depending on the background, sometimes I may need to load a new selection coming from the opposite (or other alternate) location. This is because with Aligned, PSE automatically changes the source point and loads a new selection as it follows the cursor. I do this because in this particular case I want the cloning to follow the original image’s texture/color of the background.

While moving/clicking on this particular image I did have to “load” a new selection a few times to get the desired cloud “texture” over the words. And here is the result:

No Words

The key thing to remember here is that this is basically a copy/paste technique. Think of it this way…when you have “loaded” a stamp you merely place (paste) it somewhere. When you use a brush, you “paint” the loaded selection over your image. I hope that helps differentiate between the two tools.

One last “trick” for the Clone Stamp. Remember at the top of the post I said something about replacing a missing tooth? I’m going to show you how I can do that. Here’s a cute picture of two brothers from Pixabay:

Cute Brothers

See the missing tooth on the boy to the left? I want to replace that tooth. I’m going to zoom in pretty tight so you can get a good look at the teeth I’ll be working with:

What I’m going to do is “clone” the tooth on the right side of the mouth that corresponds with the empty space on the left side. I’m still going to be using a soft round rush and I resize it to cover that right-side tooth:

Tooth Source Identified

Hopefully you can see the “brush circle” around that tooth. I also need to be certain that the opacity is set to 100%. I then Alt+Click to set the right tooth as the clone source.

Since that right tooth is likely going to be at a different angle/orientation than the missing left tooth would have been, I can’t just “paste” it over that hole. So, how do I fix that? Easy…

With the source (tooth) selected/loaded, I press the Alt key while clicking on the Create a new layer icon in the Layers panel. This will open the New Layer dialog box:

New Layer Options

I name the new layer New Tooth and click OK. Keeping the New Tooth layer as the active layer, I then position the cursor over the left side of the mouth where the tooth is missing and click (paste) the selected tooth into the empty area. This cloned tooth is over the hole but now on its own layer:

Tooth Cloned

You can see that it’s not placed exactly in the right position or at the correct angle. But because it’s on its own layer I can manipulate/reposition the tooth.

With the New Tooth layer still active I flip the layer horizontally by going to the top tool bar and clicking Image->Rotate->Flip Layer Horizontal.

I then select the move tool, hover the cursor outside of one of the corner handles, and drag to rotate the tooth into its proper position:

Cloned Tooth Rotated

In this particular case I also needed to resize it just a bit to make it look a bit more natural. If that new tooth wasn’t on its own layer, I’d never have been able to do that. But here is the finished photo without a missing tooth:

Missing Tooth Replaced

Now you know how to put a clone (or even a Healing Brush) source “selection” on its own layer. You’d be surprised how many times this little trick will come in handy! It’s particularly useful if you’re cloning a smile from one photo to replace a frown in another 😉

I didn’t cover every single aspect or option for these tools. I’d encourage you to experiment on your own with those that I didn’t cover. If you’re not sure where to go with them you can either reach out to me or search for specific tips on the internet.

I hope this post has at least helped you get a better understanding of all the “healing properties” available to us in PSE.

Additional Thoughts On Re-Touching

More Healing Tool Tips

Don’t get too carried away with “fixing” photos. My son really gives me a hard time when I “photoshop” two different photos to create a new one. He much prefers all things to be “natural”. I get his point but a little re-touching is great if we can make the photo look just a bit nicer.

Each of the tools I covered is “destructive” by nature. That means you are making permanent changes to your image. Yes, we can always “undo” things but only so many times. So, it’s always a good idea to work on a duplicate copy of any image you edit.

You may want to use the Spot Healing Brush to fix small areas and save the Healing Brush for larger areas.

If you want to use either the Clone Stamp or Healing Brush tools non-destructively, just put your source selection on a new empty layer. Then you can manipulate it as necessary…perhaps even use some masking to refine things a bit more.

Use of the Clone tool can sometimes provide a dead giveaway: If you paint out a flaw with a sampled area that differs even slightly in color, a line of demarcation is visible where you paint. Changing the brush size can often overcome this.

Remember…mastery of tools comes from practice.

As always, if you have any questions or want to make a suggestion about a topic you’d like me to cover, please don’t ever hesitate to “Message Me”.

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