Lessons

Lesson Info

Spot Healing, Healing, And Cloning

continuing with retouching will move on. Teoh. The healing brush is so the keyboard shortcut for the healing family is J on your keyboard, and we're going to start with this right here, which is a Band Aid that have little thoughts coming out of it. That's the spot healing brush tool. Let me zoom in on this. So if you are a portrait photographer, you probably deal with us a lot, not just with teenagers but also with newborn babies. Um, to heal some of these things and all the way that this tool works is so simple. You just grab it and you just kind of brush over brush over little pimples or zits or whatever you want to get rid of and it takes them away. That's all there is to it. Best practices would mean that we shouldn't be doing this on a blank layer, which I forgot. So before you do any of that, you want to make a new blank layer, and then you can come in here and paint, and you want to make sure. I guess in order for that to work when you're on a blank layer, you have to put a che...

ck mark here in the options bar where it says sample all layers right here. If you don't, nothing will happen. Like, no matter what, you do nothing. Whoa, I don't know what that. Even Waas, huh? Oh, because I painted over where I already had stuff. But, um, what's happening when we sample all layers is when you do a little bit more here, so you can see what's happening is the tool is reaching down to sample the background of the healthy tissue area. And then it's gonna put that on top in this layer. So if I hide the background layer, that's what we have. We just have the healed areas on this layer. So if we, for example, if I throw this layer away and I just have a blank layer and I don't have sample all layers on, I'm sampling nothing and painting nothing does that make sense. So it's a good idea to work on that blank layer. But in order for that to happen at all, you have to turn on sample all layers, so just know that. Rewind it positive. Watch it again, because when you go home, you'll use this and you'll think, OK, you've got my blank layer and then you'll be like It is not doing anything, that's why So that's how that tool works on a larger scale. Here we have this image, so you could also use the same tool to retouch, um, things like tattoos. So again you would just make a blank layer, make my breasts a little bigger. Now you might run into trouble with. This is sort of a semi automatic tool like it's semi. It's figuring out a lot of this on its own. In other words, I'm just clicking and like, scribbling on stuff, and it's figuring out what to replace it with. So you will run into limitations with that. Pimples are good because they're just little dots, so they're easy and Photoshopped configure it out. But like when you get into the more complex areas or areas where, like here we have extreme dark versus her skin tone, there's a lot more contrast. Photoshopped doesn't always do as well, so when you get to an area where you start running into problems, then you want to switch from the spot healing brush to the regular hailing brush. The difference is that now I can tell photo shop what to sample from before It was just kind of guessing. But here I can tell Photoshopped Hey, I want you to sample this area and I want you to put it down here. So the way that you do that is by holding down Ault or option on your keyboard, Ault or options. So when I hold alter option, my cursor changes into this little target and then I click with my mouse. Just click. So Ault option click. And now I've told Photo Shop, Where does sample from? And now if I just mouse over this, you'll see I haven't even done it yet. But I'm previewing It's showing me that it's selecting this area and it's gonna apply it here. So now when I click and I drag you see that it did it applied it. In fact, it even applied her little mole or is it or whatever that is is now down here. So that brings me to the point where you have to keep an eye on what you're doing. So when you alter or option click to set a sample point, watch what happens now, while I click while I'm dragging. I don't know if you can see it very well. I'm going to just kind of pause here for a minute. We can get it in a good spot. Come on, cursor. So there's a little, um, plus sign. You see it directly above my brush, right where I sampled. There's a little cross hair there, and that's gonna follow me as it's not rendering super well, but there you can see it. It's gonna follow me as I'm painting, and whatever is underneath that cross hair is going to come out of my brush. So I've said a source point. And now, as I'm painting, the source point is moving. So when you do this, you have to keep an eye on where your brushes, but also where your source point is, because it will follow you. If you drag up, it will move up, and it might run into things that are not helpful. So you have to be strategic about the length of stroke that you're doing. You may not be able to just click and, like, scribble all around. You may have to click and do a short brushstroke because you need to avoid running into something, so there's a lot of strategy involved there. But, um, you would just set a new source point. Basically, every time you're ready to do a new area, we just alter option Click said a source point and then paint and the same thing with this tool. It's also the healing brush. So we had the spot healing brush where you don't have to set source points you just paint, and then the healing brush where you set the source point. Both of those tools work well when you're on a blank layer, but you also want to make sure in this case it's not a check box. It's a drop down. So this tool you can choose to have it sample all layers, your current layer and all there's below or just your current layer. You can actually change that, but for this to work when you try this at home, make sure you're on that blank layer, and you also follow up by telling it to sample all layers. Otherwise, again, you'll be sampling transparency and painting transparency, and then you'll be so frustrated and I don't want you to have that experience. Um, and it'll happen anyway, So just remember, hopefully this little jog your memory and you'll think Oh, yeah, yeah, Change that. And I still do it to where I'm like this isn't working. Whenever something's not working in photo shop, you basically have 33 things. You check the layers panel, make sure you're on the layer you think you're on check the options bar because it's just probably a setting. Like in this case, that's not where it needs to be for your current situation, or you don't have the tool you think you have, which happens a lot. So if you can check those three things you'll probably solve, like 99% of your issues and Photoshopped. I should also tell you what we're talking about brushes and whether they're retouching tools or not. If you have your caps lock key on, you will not see your brush tip. You'll see it this cross hair so I won't tell you how many years it took me to figure this out. I had never seen it written. This was all before creative life before social media and all of that. I never saw it written in any magazines. I never saw any tutorials. Nobody addressed that. And eventually I figured out that it was the caps lock key. But it was a very frustrating experience. So just know that if you're ever working with your brushes and you're like, I can't see the cursor changing and I can't see whatever you might have your caps lock room. All right. So, um, something here with this, the rest of the tattoo, You would just follow the same procedure, alter or option, click an area and then paint and keep painting. Set a new source area to cover up this. Now you're going to run into a problem with this piece. That's so big because, um, hoops and I'm enlightened Lynn mode. So let's switch that to normal. And that should help a little bit. Not a ton, though. You run into this problem a little bit with the healing tool because of just the way it works is that it's blending information. It's not replacing. So just like healing. I mean, it kind of just heels it It doesn't just copy it over so you can run into challenges like this when you have this large, dark area, and we're trying to heal it into a lighter area. That's too big of a contrast. So what, you end up getting, as you can see here, you get this sort of smeary nothing. I mean, it's just kind of a smeary mess. OK, so in these situations, you're better off switching to another tool called the Clone Stamp. And I'm gonna show you in another image. Ah, I'll show you the clone stamp in action, and that is in our hair tie brace. Okay, so here's another example where she has a lighter colored skin and then she's wearing a hair tie bracelet. If you're a wedding photographer, you know this nightmare, Um, and maybe portrait's to like. People always have hair type bracelets on, and they've just wear it, and it just looks I don't like it of photos, so we need to fix this, but the same situation would happen here, too. So if we're using this healing brush, Aiken all to click and said a source and I can paint over this and it might do OK, like, of course, that's doing okay. Now let me make a new layer, um, and of course it's doing OK because I just said it wouldn. So there are some cases where the clone stamp in the healing brush they behave similarly. They are replacing something in an image with something else. But, uh, the healing brush blends and the the clone stamp just copies just close. So eventually we're gonna get you concede to like this area we're getting sort of, ah, dark smear at the end of that hair tie bracelet. So to solve for this, I'll do as much as I can, I think with this tool, So but eventually, I'm just getting a smear. So what I want to do is switch to the clone stamp. So that's actually a different family that's over here. Clone stamp tool. And again, we want to be on a blank layer, and we want to make sure up in the options bar that we tell it to sample current and below. Or I prefer all layers because I don't know. It just makes more sense to me, but we want to make sure it's sampling our current layer and the background so it works just like the healing brush, and that you have to alter or option click to set a source point. So, for example, I could alter option click down here. I want to find an area that is similar to the area I'm trying to fix. Obviously, I don't want a source green over here or it's gonna be painting green. Um, I also want to change the opacity. Maybe we'll see we'll started 100% and then maybe we'll change it later. But here, if I saw it my source point here than in painting green in the image. So that's not what I want. So I want to set my source point on an area that's a good match, just like tissue for organ donation. You have to match, right? So all the option off click over here and now I can paint this and I don't get the smearing mess that was created when Photo Shop was trying to blend the dark hair tie with her skin tone. It wasn't working out. Now, when I get to the edge over here, I'm going to alter option, click right on this, the edge of her wrist, and then I can just click here and follow it down, and I'll let go before I get too far and the tail runs into the image. You've got to remember that as you're painting, that tail is following you. So if we look here, you can see better how the tail follows you. That's your source point. I call it a tale, but it will follow you as you paint. So you have to watch where it is at all times, and you have to sort of plan your stroke to accommodate it. So I'm gonna just kind of fill in this area now Here. I want to clone over. I've cloned You can see I've cloned the cusp of her jacket right up here, and I want to get rid of that so I'll sample a new source point and then I could just clone that out. You could also lower the opacity. Sometimes when you're cloning or healing things, you get close and then you have to kind of finesse it a little bit. So I think we're close here, but I'm gonna ault or option Click said a source point. And then, with a lower capacity, all kind of paint this in to just blend it a little bit more. Or when I look here and her wrist, I can see what I call ghosting. So if I toggle this layer on and off, I can see sort of some marks happening where, where either that's where the hair tie waas. Or maybe she had it there and then moved it, and then it somehow they're still a mark. So I'm gonna lower my opacity and all click to set the source point and then just brush over that to sort of mix it a little bit. Groups not quite like that. You can also, once you get pretty close, maybe now I could switch back to the healing brush so I'll switch back because now what I really want to do is blend so well, just alter option, click and blend. Blend that in a little bit. So you just basically work on it until you get a result that you're happy with