An Introduction to the Spot Healing Brush Tool

The Main Uses of the Spot Healing Brush Tool

• Retouching portraits of people: The Spot Healing Brush is especially good at removing unwanted marks on skin, such as blemishes, cuts, bruises, and freckles.
• Removing dust and other minor flaws: The Spot Healing Brush is the most effective Photoshop tool for removing small unwanted elements—from scanned photos and negatives—such as dust spots, hairs, and other minor imperfections.
• Removing entire unwanted elements: The Spot Healing Brush makes it possible to remove specific, unwanted parts of an image without leaving a gap or empty spot in the image. For instance, you can use the Spot Healing Brush to remove a person from the foreground of a landscape while simultaneously filling in the gap in the landscape that the person’s body obscured.
• Restoring old photos: The Spot Healing Brush works wonders on common flaws in old photos, such as spots, stains, and especially fine lines and cracks. If you’ve ever seen a before-and-after of a cracked and speckled old photo restored to “new” condition, you’ve seen what the Spot Healing Brush can do.
   
  
   
  

How the Spot Healing Brush Tool Works

1. With the Spot Healing Brush tool active, you paint directly onto the flawed area that you’d like to fix. You can paint either in strokes, by clicking and dragging, or on specific spots, by clicking and releasing. For instance, to remove an unwanted crack in an image, you’d paint along the length of the crack. To remove an individual dust spot, you’d click once, directly on the spot. You can also “paint” over entire areas to remove larger unwanted elements.
2. Once you click or paint over a flaw in the image, the Spot Healing Brush automatically samples nearby pixels and uses those pixels to fix the problem. With specific spots, the tool usually works almost perfectly on the first try. Using the tool to fix major flaws, such as long cracks or large unevenly shaped spots, sometimes requires a few more steps, as explained later in this guide.

Advantages of the Spot Healing Brush Tool

• Versatility: The Spot Healing Brush tool is the only retouching tool that works equally well on spot-shaped and line-shaped flaws. For instance, if you’re working on retouching an old photo marred with stains, lines, and cracks, the Spot Healing Brush tool can serve as an all-in-one solution.
• Efficiency: The Spot Healing Brush tool is the only retouching tool that can simultaneously remove unwanted elements and patch the affected area with one click or stroke of the mouse. Other tools, such as the Patch tool and the Clone Stamp tool, can perform the same retouching tasks, but they require several additional steps.

How to Access the Spot Healing Brush Tool

The Spot Healing Brush tool is located in Photoshop’s Tools palette in the same button that houses the Healing Brush tool, the Patch tool, and the Red Eye tool. Its icon is a tiny bandage with a white spot in the bottom left corner. Be careful not to confuse it with the Healing Brush tool’s icon, which contains the same bandage but with no white spot. If you don’t see the Spot Healing Brush tool’s icon in the Tools palette, you can find it as follows:

 

1. Click on the icon of the Healing Brush tool , Patch tool , or Red Eye tool in the Tools palette and move your cursor to the right.
    
   
    
   
    
   
2. A submenu will appear to the right in which you can select the Spot Healing Brush tool. (Alternatively, you can press Shift+J repeatedly to cycle through the four tools in the Tools palette button in which the Spot Healing Brush tool is located until you land on the Spot Healing Brush tool.)
    
   

The Spot Healing Brush Toolbar

Once you select the Spot Healing Brush tool, the Spot Healing Brush toolbar will appear just under the main Photoshop toolbar at the top of your screen.