Learn how to efficiently remove blemishes from an image using Photoshop's Healing Brush and Spot Healing Brush tools. This tutorial provides a step-by-step process of utilizing these tools, ensuring you maintain the quality of your original image.
Key Insights
- The tutorial emphasizes the importance of using a new layer titled 'blemish adjusted' to maintain the original image, ensuring that the changes made are non-destructive.
- Both the Spot Healing Brush and Healing Brush tools are used in this photoshop process. While the Spot Healing Brush is good for smaller blemishes, the Healing Brush tool can be used for larger ones by defining a source point for Photoshop to draw pixels from.
- After making adjustments, it's crucial to save the work as a Photoshop file to maintain the changes, ensuring that the image quality remains high after blemish removal.
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In this video, we'll begin removing blemishes. Let's open our file, and we'll select the Blemish.jpeg and click Open**.
As you can see, we have some blemishes that we can fix within this image. Let's begin by creating a new layer so we can maintain our original, and let's title this Blemish Adjusted**. Let's double-click our background layer, give it a new title—**Blemish Original**—and finally, we'll lock our original photo and work with the Blemish Adjusted layer. To begin removing some of these blemishes, we're going to use a combination of the Healing Brush Tool and the Spot Healing Brush Tool**.
Let's start with the Spot Healing Brush Tool**. It's in the same gallery as the Healing Brush Tool**, so if we click and hold, we can select the Spot Healing Brush Tool**. This tool works similarly to a brush head where you can adjust the size. Let's keep it at around 50**, which is about the size of some of the blemishes we'll remove.
Next, let's zoom into our image to get a closer look using CTRL + Plus (+)** on the keyboard, and then scroll with the mouse up and down, holding CTRL to scroll right or left. Now we'll begin using our Spot Healing Brush Tool**. The way this works is we can simply click, and Photoshop does the work to remove the blemish or heal whatever area we're working on.
All we need to do is click over the blemishes, and Photoshop will do the work to remove them. Keep in mind that these changes are destructive, so it's important that we have our original photo. Otherwise, we won’t be able to undo changes unless we go to History and locate the specific click we want to revert. We'll go through and remove some of the smaller blemishes.
While this can seem tedious, if we toggle the visibility, we'll see that it's already making a difference. In addition, as we get to the bigger blemishes, another thing we can do is click and drag over the area and release. Again, we’ll allow Photoshop to do the work to fix the blemishes. Let’s keep working on some of the smaller blemishes before we use the Healing Brush Tool for some of the larger ones.
If we toggle visibility again, we can see this makes a big difference in our image. Next, let's go over the Healing Brush Tool**, found in the Tools gallery with the Spot Healing Brush Tool**. This tool works similarly. However, with this tool, we can define where we want Photoshop to use pixels from by selecting a sample source.
If we try to start using this tool and click, we’ll see that nothing happens. We need to ALT + Click to define a source point—this tells Photoshop where to draw pixels from to fix the image. Press ENTER**, and while holding ALT on the keyboard, we’ll see the cursor now looks like a target.
This indicates where Photoshop will pull pixels from. If we want to fix this blemish right here, we’ll select an area of skin that looks similar—maybe just nearby—to define as our sample area. We'll click, and now if we move to the blemish, we can see a preview of what it will look like using those pixels.
We'll click, and we can drag slightly to blend, and Photoshop will repeat some of those sampled pixels to heal the blemish. We'll do the same thing using ALT + Click to define a new area and fix the next blemish. Sometimes, you'll need to use ALT multiple times depending on what you're correcting. If you click and drag, Photoshop may repeat pixels from the sampled area.
If the result is too light or doesn't match well, use ALT again to select a better area. For example, clicking here gave us a lighter patch because it’s still sampling from a lighter area. We’ll press ALT**, click again, and try another adjustment. We'll repeat this for a few more blemishes. While this won't always produce a perfect result, it will reduce blemishes enough that we can go back to the Spot Healing Brush Tool to fine-tune.
Simply remember to keep using ALT to guide Photoshop where to sample from. Finally, I'll go back to the Tools gallery and reselect the Spot Healing Brush Tool to make a few final adjustments now that most blemishes are smaller. I’ll click on a few remaining spots that still stand out.
We’ll scroll up. Sometimes, it can be difficult to distinguish between blemishes and birthmarks, so it’s important to zoom in closely to see what you’re working with. Finally, up here, we have a strand of hair across the subject’s forehead. We can fix that simply by clicking and dragging, and Photoshop will begin blending the area.
While Photoshop doesn't always do a perfect job, with enough clicks and attention, we can usually get a clean result. All right, I think this is a good stopping point. Let's look back at our original image. After one more change here, if we toggle the visibility, we can see that this is definitely a major improvement and we can see exactly what we’ve changed.
Let’s press CTRL + S to save our work, making sure it's a Photoshop file and adding “**Adjusted**” to the filename. Press ENTER to save, and click OK to maximize compatibility. In the next video, we’ll begin removing a logo from an image.
See you there!