Healing brush vs spot healing brush

This is just a short post. It's a post about the difference between the Spot healing brush and the Healing brush tool in Photoshop.

Both can be found using the keyboard shortcut J. By holding the Shift key you can toggle through the J tool options.

Spot Healing brush tool:

This option works really well for removing spots etc. in for example the sky. Just paint over the spot you want to remove and Photoshop does the rest. It's content aware, so Photoshop does its best to make it look perfect. 

An example:
Let's remove one bird from this image. Select the spot healing brush tool and remove the left and right bird. Best thing to do first is to duplicate the background layer, so that you do your editing on a separate layer.

The spot healing brush tool also works with straight lines. Select a size of the spot healing brush that's a little bigger than the lines. By holding the Shift key and painting over the line you repair what needs to be fixed.

Let's remove telephone line by using the Shift key. Most of the times, content aware does a pretty good job. But sometimes you've got to repeat the action more than once to get the result you're after. 

Healing brush tool:

The Healing brush tool works a little different. It works well for example with skin retouching.

If you're working with this tool, you have to first take a sample of the skin using the Alt key. This is the sample (reference) you use for the skin you want to correct. 

Let me show you with this picture:

 

I'm going to remove the pimple on her forehead. I selected a part of the skin just under it by using the Alt key. Then I painted over the Pimple and Photoshop does the rest. Ofcourse I worked on a copy of the background layer.

With this technique I can also remove the dark lines under her eyes.  You don't want to completely remove them, because that would look really unnatural. I just wanted to make them a bit softer. 

Make a copy of the layer and select an area under that dark line. Then paint over the dark line(s). You can do it step by step by selecting the correct color tone. Mind you, with an Opacity of 100% it looks really unnatural. 

By reducing the Opacity of the layer, it looks more natural.

Both great tools if you know where to find them and how to use them. 

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pictures from pixabay.com