Healing Brush Tool

Healing Brush Tool

Learn how to use the Spot Healing Brush Tool to retouch photos in Photoshop.

When to use

Using the Spot Healing Brush Tool is a great way to remove unwanted objects from any of your photos.

Instructions

Getting Started with the Spot Healing Brush

• First, open one of the three landscape photos from the resources folder.
• In this example, we will be starting with the photo of the cherry blossom tree.
• Select the 'Background' layer and duplicate it by pressing Command/Ctrl+J.
• Next, select the Spot Healing Brush (J) from the toolbar. 
• Along the toolbar at the top of the interface, make sure to choose 'Content Aware'. 

Making Objects Disappear

• With your Spot Healing Brush Tool (J) selected, paint over the vertical light post under the cherry blossom tree to remove it from the photo. 
• We can also brush over other parts of the photo that are distracting to see how it works.

Practice Makes Perfect

• Continue this process to do some retouching on the other two landscape photos. 
• Remember that you will want to create a copy of the layer first. 

Hints & tips

• Unlike the Clone Stamp Tool, the Spot Healing Brush Tool doesn't work on any empty layer. Instead, it needs to be applied to the layer itself. 
• Instead of sampling part of a photo and painting to cover up another area, the Spot Healing Brush Tool tries to guess what to fill your selection with based on the surrounding pixels.