In the toolbox, select the Spot Healing Brush tool (J).ģ. Make a duplicate of the image on a new layer by pressing Cmd + J (Mac) or Ctrl + J (Windows).Ģ. In order to work non-destructively and not damage your image. In this example, I’m using the Spot Healing Brush to remove some orange spots from a butterfly’s wing.ġ. How To Use The Spot Healing Brush For Retouching It really does work like magic and couldn’t be simpler to use. It works by sampling pixels from your photo and then painting on top of the spot, matching the texture, lighting, transparency, and shading. Lower diffusion is useful for greater precision in smaller areas and higher is good for working in larger areas.The Spot Healing Brush tool in Photoshop is an easy way to quickly get rid of zits, spots, blemishes and other imperfections from photos. When diffusion is set to 7, there is the most spread around the brush – the edge is the softest. Another way to say this is that the edge is the hardest. When the diffusion is set to 1, there is the least spread around the brush. That number will determine how large the spread of pixels around your brush is. There is a setting in the toolbar when using the healing brush called ‘ diffusion.’ From a drop-down, you can choose a number from 1-7. ‘Proximity match’ is similar to ‘content-aware’ in that it ‘notices’ what is around the area being healed, but it is less intelligent and is analyzing a smaller area. ‘Create texture’ again does pretty much what it sounds like – it creates a texture to place into the healed area. They are ‘ content-aware,’ ‘create texture,’ and ‘ proximity match.’ ‘Content-aware’ does exactly what it sounds like – it is ‘aware’ of the image’s content and attempts to create something based on that content to replace the unwanted pixels. There are three modes that the healing brush uses to determine how it will replace whatever is being removed. When working on a new layer, make sure the ‘sample all layers’ checkbox is selected, otherwise, the healing brush will have nothing to sample on the new layer.

Working non-destructively in Photoshop, meaning that you aren’t altering the pixels in your background layer so that changes can easily be reverted, is a good thing, and the way to do this with the healing brush is to create a new layer above your background layer on which to do the healing work.

Healing brush photoshop