Chapter H: Healing Brush to Hue

Hard Light

(See Blending modes )

Healing Brush

This was one of the most exciting features to appear on Photoshop 7.0 and is located on the toolbar where the airbrush tool used to be. The healing brush is a glorified Clone tool and does a fantastic job on some things and makes a hash of others.

I would suggest that until you are familiar with this tool you can always try it first and if it doesn't work, undo the action and switch to the Clone tool.

The reason it's excellent when it works is that it takes the sample from the area you first select, just like the Clone tool, but when you paint over the area you are repairing the sampled pixels are not just laid down. The program looks at what you are cloning over and blends the two. In the photograph of a lime (right) there are a few blemishes.

I've sampled from a lighter area (highlighted in the red circle) knowing that if I tried cloning from here with the Clone tool it would produce a glaringly obvious patch (middle).

When the healing tool is used to sample from the same area it ensures the original pixel color and density are not lost.

If the area to be 'healed' had been a larger area of black then the original pixels would have influenced the result and it wouldn't have done much to cover the blemishes. Overall it's a stunning...