Hi guys welcome and welcome back to another five minute Friday it's great to have you here if
you're new consider hitting the subscribe button if you learned something from this
I'm Jessica McGovern multi-award-winning international portrait photographer
and today I'm going to hopefully share some little secrets about a specific
tool in photoshop to enrich your life I have five minutes so without further ado let's get stuck in
we're gonna be in photoshop it doesn't really matter which version you're in but the newest
one is always useful the tool that we're going to discuss today and hopefully share some additional
things about it is as you will already know from the title of this the healing brush tool not the
spot healing brush tool or the clone source tool the patch tool or any of the other healing tools
we're talking specifically about the healing brush tool the healing brush tool is a misunderstood
tool and I'm here to show you that it's actually the best one of all of the above
that I've mentioned to use in your retouching and hopefully share a few little tips and tricks along
the way so what is the healing brush tool where do you find it well in Photoshop no matter which
workspace you're in you should be able to find the little icon on the side which is often just set up
as the spot healing brush tool it looks like a plaster with a little circle you want to right
click on that and select the healing brush tool from the list now what is the healing brush tool
technically it's kind of an amalgamation between the healing powers of the spot healing brush
tool and the clone source tool so it also takes a sample of a pattern but then it blends it really
nicely first things first if you're brand new you want to go find something you want to remove in
this case it's a lens mark I'm going to go ahead and change the brush size we've done keyboard
shortcuts before we're going to take a sample by holding down the Option key Alt on our windows
take a sample from an area that you're wanting to duplicate go ahead and go over the bit you're
wanting to fix and then just blend in a little circle easiest way of doing it but really that's
very basic now on Dora here we can see that she's got this area of coat naturally sat in that way
but this is quite unsightly it's a bit distracting for me if I want to heal this area we've got
different options we could use the clone stamp tool we could use a content aware fill but if I
pull from another area and replace that here using the healing brush tool what you can see is that
the coat's going because it pulls the texture and blends the colours coats going in a very specific
direction and that's downwards whereas this part of the neck obviously needs to be going outwards
so what can we do easy peasy lemon squeezy we want to go ahead and grab our healing brush tool here
take a sample from the opposite side if you've got a symmetrical situation go to your clone
source panel if you don't have that window clone source and go to your little W section and hit
the little flippy icon that's going to flip it horizontal so what we can now do is line up where
that location was and if you're struggling pick a landmark like the edge of the coat line that up on
the other side and then we want to go ahead and blend and what we're going to do is we're going
to take an exact opposite of the area that we're working on and replace it to the other side and
so what we're left with is actually a pretty damn good heel we've got the before and the after you
can also do all your normal things that you can do with a clone source including your rotations which
you can use a keyboard shortcut for but it's a lot quicker to go ahead and use that so by
utilising our clone source panel and the healing brush tool what we can end up doing is blending
and cloning at the exact same time so you don't have it in unsightly clone marks and the colours
are blended nicely but there are limitations to the healing brush tool and I've got this image
open as an example because the limitations of the healing brush tool tend to happen when you hit a
highly contrasted area or an area that already has an object so for example what we could not do in
this image is go ahead and run a source let's just take this as an example and reset my source off
and if we went over the line of the subject it tries to blend and in the process makes a right
old mess so you don't want to go over any solid lines for lighter areas it will get confused at
first and this is a very important point so what we want to do is take a sample source
an area of texture maybe and then if we start going over a light area it kind of gets a bit
confused and it turns into a mush keep your mouth pressed down and keep working the area and
what it will do is that you will can you see it's starting to darken everything that we've just done
so it's working through those areas and then going back and going okay you want me to be darker
you want me to be darker I will go darker and so in the process if you just keep your mouse
pressed down or your stylus pressed down if you're using a Wacom and keep working it in
little circles you will end up with a really clean transition between the two when we've cleaned up
all of these different areas really nicely we end up with an image that's transformed simply
by removing those bogus spots so using that healing brush tool really blends it through
in a much quicker more efficient and seamless way than it would do if we use the clone source or the
spot healing brush tool spot healing brush tool liable to leave little lines whereas the clone
source tool gives you an exact duplication and so usually you'll needed to do additional work to
blend the lightness the colour the saturation the tone the hue everything else that you need to do
including the pattern and also the depth so by using the healing brush tool you cut down on all
of the additional time all of the retouching touch-ups that you have to do because you've
done your retouching and in the end you end up with an image that looks absolutely epic and
is ready to be finished off and that is why the healing brush tool is literally the best thing
since sliced bread because it both clones and it heals and blends all at the same time and gives
you all the flexibility of your clone source transform tools that's today's five minute
Friday hopefully that was useful for you if it was please do let me know if you want me to do a
five minute video on something else put it in the comments uh let's have a chat about that hopefully
you're enjoying these and i can't wait to see you soon see you next week for challenge review video