From the course: Photoshop 2023 Essential Training

Removing distracting elements with the Healing, Patch, and Clone tools - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2023 Essential Training

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Removing distracting elements with the Healing, Patch, and Clone tools

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- [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, the Clone Stamp Tool and all of their options. We'll start with the Spot Healing Brush. We can select it from the toolbar or we can just tap the J key. Now the Spot Healing Brush automatically selects the sample spot, so all you need to do is click and drag or paint over the bad spot and Photoshop's going to replace it with one of these three options, either content aware, create texture or proximity match. The content aware is the default option and it's going to compare like nearby image content and then try to maintain details like shadows and object edges, but it's actually going to create new information. And I find that this is the option that typically gives me the best results. Now for more flexible editing at the bottom of the layers panel, I'll click on the plus icon in order to add a new layer so I can do my retouching on this new layer. In fact, let's go ahead and just double click and I'll go ahead and rename that retouching. Now in order for the Spot Healing Brush to sample from the background layer and then create the retouching on the retouching layer, I'll need to make sure that I enable this option to sample all layers. All right, let's go ahead and zoom in. I'll use command one and then I'll use the space bar in order to reposition the image here. And now you can see all I need to do is just paint over any of these distracting element and Photoshop is going to automatically get rid of them. So, my goal here is to remove most of this ice and in any of the shiny rocks and we're going to do that with a variety of different tools. But I'm just going to start here. Now, one thing, when you have an area like this if I want to get rid of this ice and let me just zoom in maybe once more. If I want to get rid of this ice, I often find it best to go on either side of it because then Photoshop has a better idea of where the line is here that it's trying to match. And if it doesn't do it correctly the first time you can always use command Z or control Z in order to paint again and see if you can get a little bit better of a match. And sometimes you might actually have to paint over the same area more than once. All right, so I like that and I'm going to go ahead and move on. I'm just going to get rid of most of the kind of smaller areas here. And then I'm going to work on these bigger areas of ice with a different tool. But you can see it's quite quick and easy to simply paint over. And you might also notice that my size, the circle representing the brush here is actually larger than what I'm painting, and that's because I'm using a pressure sensitive tablet. And so, if I press lightly, the stroke that I create with the Healing Brush is going to be smaller than that size. But of course, we can always use the left bracket or the right bracket if we need to increase or decrease the size of the Spot Healing Brush. Okay, let's move to the Healing Brush. So, the Healing Brush tool, it gives you the option to select the area that you want to use as the source. So if you want more control, this would be the tool to use. Now because you're choosing the source there's no content aware option up here in the options bar but it's still going to blend the colors and the tones together in the area that you paint on for a good match. Again, I'll need to be sure that I'm sampling not the current layer but either the current and below. So that'd be the retouching in the background or all of the layers in this case, since there's only two layers. I also want to mention this aligned option. So, with the aligned option turned off this can be really useful if you have an image where there's not a lot of good sample area. Here, we have a lot of area that we can sample from, but if you don't, well let's just see how it works. So I'll option click or alt click on Windows to set the source point. Then I'll release the keyboard modifier. And now, when I paint over in this area to remove that ice we can see that there's a crosshair for the source area and then the circle for where I'm painting. When a line is turned off, if I scoot over here and I want to remove this area, well, you can see that that crosshair is still going to sample from that original location. So in this case that's not really what I want because we can see that I'm getting the texture from the sand in the water. So I'll undo that and I'll turn on aligned. So now I'm going to option click to the right of that piece of ice and then I'll paint over it and Photoshop will remove it. But now if I move to a different area say over here and I start painting we can see the cross hairs have kept an alignment, so it's sampling just from a little ways to the right of where I'm painting. So this might be a little too big of a spot. Yeah, I might need to get a little bigger of a brush and maybe option click up here and drag over that in order to fix it. All right, let's keep going. I'm going to get rid of this rock. So again, I'll option click little smaller brush this time and just paint over it and you can, you can watch as you paint. Photoshop is actually trying to fix the area live so as you actually paint. Okay, so that is the Healing Brush tool. Then we also have the Patch Tool. And this is a great tool. It kind of has the best of both worlds. So, it has the content aware technology, which you can choose under the patch option. But it also gives you control over the area that you want to sample from. So, I'm going to select, say this piece of ice right here and then you position your cursor inside your selection and you can drag it to wherever you want to sample from. So in this case, I'll select this good sand there and Photoshop will go ahead and patch that. One thing that I want to mention, I don't think the sample all layers is on by default. So, because we're working on this retouching layer we'll want to be sure to enable that. Another unique feature of the Patch Tool that I want to point out is when you're in this content aware mode you can actually change the structure as well as the color after the fact. So, as long as I still have the marching ants here I can change the way that Photoshop blends the texture or the structure as well as the color if I need to. Okay, let's keep moving around the image. And I'll just get rid of this ice right here. Maybe this piece right here, I might be getting rid of too much of it, I'm usually not quite this zoomed in when I move around. All right, let's try this right here. One thing you might notice is you probably want to also include the shadow or when something's patched, it's going to look funny. So I'll hold down the shift key and I'll just add a little bit more of that and move the patch over here. And it's not doing a good job because it can't quite tell where this piece of ice ends and where I'm patching it. So, at this point, I would undo that and I'm going to deselect that and I'm actually going to move to another tool. And that is the Clone Stamp Tool. You want to make sure that you have the Clone Stamp not the Pattern Stamp Tool. And again, we need to choose what we want to sample. So I'm going to choose current and below, and then we need to option click in order to set our sample area and then we'll paint to clone that area. But I will note that it is an exact clone so it's an exact duplicate of another area. So it does take a bit more practice because often you have to set the sample point to an area that has similar tone and color otherwise you'll be able to tell that you used the tool. But it's actually the tool that I prefer when there's a lot of good source information because then Photoshop doesn't have to use the content or technology to make up any information. And I can really control the edges. So I'm going to get a little bit smaller of a brush here by just using the left bracket key. I'll option click in order to set my source point here and then I'm going to get an exact clone of that area. So you do want to watch for repeating elements. But at least I know that I'm not going to get any weird blending along the edges. So I'll just keep setting my sample point and I'm going to get rid of that area there. Let's start on the left side and just make sure I'm getting rid of everything I want to. So again, I'll just option and click and then clone over that piece of ice. And here I actually want to get rid of a lot of this ice. So, let's start maybe up here. This would be a good sample area and then I can start painting. And you might think, well, why don't you just get a larger brush? I certainly could get a larger brush, however, if I do I'll want to make sure that the edges stay rather hard. So, I don't want a really feathered edge to my brush because sometimes what'll happen is if there's a feather then when you make a duplicate of an area the edges are going to be a little bit soft and it'll sort of look, I don't know how to describe it besides mushy or fuzzy. You won't get a really crisp edge and you'll be able to tell where you have cloned. So, I'll go ahead and select from a different area here. And I am actually watching the areas that I paint over. I just want to make sure that I don't see any repeating patterns. For example, if I option click here on these rocks and start painting, we would see, oh, there's a duplication of those rocks and I don't want that in my image. So let me just finish right here. And then I would go in and just remove those cause our eyes are really sensitive to repeating elements in our images. Okay, let's get rid of this, get rid of this right down here. And there's probably, oh look at that. There's all this great information over here. So, alright, if I do get a larger brush then I'll want to come here and just increase the hardness of the brush a little bit so I don't get those mushy edges. And then we can do this rather quickly. Just option clicking to set the sample point and then painting over that area. And I'll also get the footprint here, I might as well. Let's just remove that. And then there's kind of this dark area in the corner. All right, let's use command zero in order to zoom out. And if we toggle the visibility of this retouching layer we can see that there was before and there's after. So just by removing all those little distracting elements I think we've made a much cleaner image. Now at this point I'm going to use the file menu to do a save as. And I'm going to save this ice on beach with an underscore oh one because I'm going to use it in the next movie when we talk about content aware fill. So, I'll save it as a Photoshop document into the same 11 local pixel editing. Click save. And as we can see, Photoshop's Healing Brushes, Patch and Clone Stamp Tool are very helpful when retouching blemishes or other distracting elements in an image.

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