From the course: Photoshop 2022 Essential Training

Removing distracting elements with the healing, patch, and clone tools - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2022 Essential Training

Removing distracting elements with the healing, patch, and clone tools

- [Instructor] Photoshop has a number of tools that make it easy to remove small distracting elements in an image. In the next few minutes, we're going to take a look at the spot healing brush, the healing brush, the patch tool, and the clone stamp tool. Now, the spot healing brush is going to automatically select the sample spot for you. So all you need to do is click on the bad spot that you want to remove. And Photoshop will replace it with one of three options. Either content aware, create texture, or a proximity match. And the content aware technology I find typically gives me the best results. I'll use Command + one in order to zoom in and then the hand tool to reposition this. So I'm looking in the lower left. Now, in order to do this in a more flexible manner, I can retouch not on the background, but on a separate layer. So in the layers panel, I'll click on the new layer icon. Let's go ahead and just rename that to retouch so we know that's my retouching layer. Then I want to make sure with all of the tools that I'm using that I have the option to either sample all layers or some of them have it worded a little different. You can sample the current layer and below or all layers. So with that toggled on, I can have the retouch layer targeted, but Photoshop will sample from the background. So now, all I need to do is just position my cursor over any of the distracting elements that I want to remove. And when I paint over them, Photoshop is going to use that content aware technology in order to remove or replace the area that I paint over with other information. So you might be wondering why every time I paint my brush size looks large, but I'm actually painting a smaller area? And that's just because I'm using a pressure-sensitive tablet to do this work. If I press harder, then I would get a larger brush there. So just a few more things to remove and then we'll switch to the healing brush. So when I select the regular healing brush tool, I don't have that content aware technology anymore because you're actually going to set the point from which you're going to sample. So you are kind of the healing brush technology. And like the other tool, we have the option to sample all of the layers. And there's also an option for alignment. So if you have an image that only has a little bit of good source area, you might want to uncheck the Aligned option. I'll go ahead and Option + click to set my source point here in the water and then I'll paint over this area. You can see now, though, without the Aligned option enabled, when I move my cursor down to maybe replace this rock right here, Photoshop is keeping the source way up in the water. So it's always going to return to that same source. I'm going to undo that using Command + Z and then enable the Aligned option. And now, when I Option + click and select or paint over this area to remove it, and then I moved to a different area, Photoshop is going to keep the source and the destination in alignment. So you can see that I've got the same distance between my brush and those cross hairs, no matter where I move in the image area. The next tool that we should look at is the patch tool. Again, we have the content aware technology here and the ability to sample all layers. We also have the option to change the structure or the texture as well as the color of the patched area after we actually apply the patch, which is a little unique. Because most of the time in Photoshop, these options you have to set before you use the tool. So let's go ahead and patch this area. I'm going to start with this ice in the water and just drag around that area. Then I can click inside and just select the area that I want to patch from. So I'm selecting the source here, but it is also using the content aware technology in order to make up the information that it needs to patch that area. And as I mentioned, you can change the structure and the color after the fact. If I move the structure down, you can see there is a pretty dramatic change there. I can also use Command + H on Mac, Control + H on Windows to just hide the edges. As I change these different options, we can see it will recalculate the structure there. And I can also have it recalculate the color, but there's not a lot of color in the original. So I'll go ahead and leave that set to zero. Now, don't forget that you've hidden those edges. I'll use Command + H again in order to show them. We can move around and see if there's anything else we want to patch. I'll just select this area here and reposition it. So it's kind of nice 'cause it gives me more control. The other thing that you might want to pay attention to when you're retouching things like this is that you don't just get rid of the ice. You're going to also need to get rid of any shadows. Now, I don't really like that patch job that it did there. So I'm going to select all of that again and just scoot that over. There we go. I like that better. Now, you may have noticed that most of the pieces of ice that I've been removing haven't been close to the other areas of ice. And that's because if I use the patch tool and I make a selection around this ice and try to remove it, sometimes I get this little blending area along the edge. So in order to avoid that, I can switch to the clone stamp tool. I can just tap the S key in order to select it. It also has the similar alignment options as well as the ability to sample all layers. Now, I find the clone stamp tool to be an excellent way to remove elements because it uses an exact duplicate of another area. And it's the tool that I prefer when there's a lot of good source information. Like in this case, there's a lot of good sand that I can choose from, but it's a little bit more difficult to use. Because you need to watch for variances in color and tone between the area that you sample for and the area that you're trying to get rid of. So I'll set the source by holding down the Option key on Mac, the Alt key on Windows. I'll just select maybe the sandy area here. And then I can start painting, and I'm going to get an exact duplicate. Hold down the Option key again to set a different source point and then just remove those little areas. So you can see, when I come along the side of this ice right here, there's no additional blending that's happening. So I'm not getting any artifacting or anything. So I'll go ahead and remove that as well. Again, I'm just holding down the Option or the Alt key whenever I want to set my source. So I'm just looking for areas that would be similar to where I'm laying this down. We'll come right up to there. That was a little too far. So I'll set the sample point a little further below and remove that. I can scoot over here. That should be fine for now. We've got this big footprint though. So let's go ahead and I'll set my sample point and then we can start removing all that area. So one thing you do want to be careful of when you're using the clone stamp tool is that you don't get any repeating patterns. So I might want to go back and just get rid of anything that's obviously repeating because our eyes are so sensitive to texture that we'll pick up those repeating elements And we'll be able to tell, for example, see the little repeating element here and here? We'd be able to tell that that has been cloned. Just a little bit more right up here. And I'll use Command + zero in order to zoom out. And we can toggle the visibility of this layer in the layers panel. So there's before and there's after we've done our retouching. Now, I want to take a moment to save the image. I'll use the File menu, choose Save As. I'm going to append this by just adding an underscore 01. And then saving it back to the Local Pixel Editing folder. I'll save it as a layered PSD file and then click Save. So as we can see, Photoshop's healing brushes, and patch, and clone stamp tool can be very helpful when removing distracting elements in our images.

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