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While the old standby Clone Stamp tool still has its place in the toolbox, the supercharged
Healing Brush taps into serious processing power when cloning pixels. It wipes out wrinkles,
blemishes, scratches, and aberrant color pixels in one swipe. But what if your image doesn’t
have a good area to clone from? Set the Healing Brush to use a pattern as its source!
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The left half of my subject’s face is
pockmarked with bumps, divots, and
dark spots, all in extraordinarily sharp
focus. I wanted to keep this sharpness
but remove the blemishes. The
ideal tool for this is the Healing Brush,
which grabs texture information from
source pixels and blends it with color
from a target area. But I couldn’t find a
good region of the face with a similar
texture for me to sample. The Pattern
Maker filter, introduced in Photoshop
7, can turn even a small rectangular
selection into a seamless pattern for
the Healing Brush’s source.
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You can work along with the steps in this article by downloading the manglasses.zip archive (3 MB) and opening the manglasses.tif file. Find a small area of your image that
has fewer blemishes. I chose a section
beside the nose. Zoom in and use a small
Healing Brush (6-pixel for me) set to
Sample. Work directly on the art layer if
you’re using Photoshop CS. Clean up the
tiny area, select it with the Marquee tool,
and choose Filter > Pattern Maker.
The healing brush is processor intensive,
so if you don’t have tons
of RAM, reduce the number of saved
History States to 10 in the General
Preferences settings. If you get in the
habit of taking snapshots regularly,
the number of History States you
track becomes less important.
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Click to enlarge
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Pattern Maker previews the entire
image with the selection still live (even
though the ants no longer march). Note
the magnification level at the bottom
corner of the dialog box and zoom in
(Command-Space-click) until you reach
100%. Enter the selection’s dimensions
(displayed at the bottom of the preview
screen) into the tile Width and Height
variables. Set the Smoothness to 3 for
smoother seams and click Generate to fill
the preview screen with the tiled pattern.
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Click to enlarge
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After increasing the Smoothness, the
tile’s content softened, so I increased the
Sample Detail to 11 to retain more of my
selection’s original content, then clicked
Generate Again. Each time you click
Generate Again, Pattern Maker randomly
generates a new pattern and stores the
previous version for review in its Tile
History (up to 20). When you’ve found
a pattern you like, click the Save Preset
Pattern file icon at the bottom of the
thumbnail viewer.
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Select the Healing Brush and set it
to Pattern mode from the menu bar.
Choose your new pattern from the
library of textures, then brush with
short strokes to repair the blemishes.
Photoshop CS users: Add a layer
above the image layer and click Use
All Layers in the menu bar. Then reduce
the opacity of the Healing Brush
layer to make some of the original
artwork smoothly blend back into
the retouch layer. Setting the Opacity
around 75% conceals any repeating
pattern that might be visible.
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Click to enlarge
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The final image is shown at left (click to enlarge).
Healing brush tips: Set your brush preference to view at
actual brush size in the General Preferences
settings. Select the Healing Brush;
it’s the bandage icon just below the crop
tool. Remember, the Healing Brush grabs
color information 10 to 12 pixels outside
the brush edge, so choose a size that
won’t capture unwanted color. Check
Aligned in the menu bar.
Zoom in and work in small strokes,
cleaning up one area at a time. You’ll
notice after setting the target point
(Option-click), your brush behaves
exactly like the Clone Stamp tool until
releasing the mouse. Then Photoshop
takes a moment to perform its calculations
before generating the actual stroke.
If surprise colors, unwanted shadows, or
bright spots appear, decrease the brush
size and make smaller strokes.
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Roger Hunsicker is Advertising Coordinator
for Caterpillar, Inc., in Peoria,
Ill., and president of Proof Positive
Design Group, a Web hosting and
Web design firm.
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