Now, an interesting thing about both the spot-healing brush and the traditional, the normal good healing brush is that they both offer texture healing functions, pattern healing functions.

Let me show you what I mean. I am going to go back to the spot healing brush and notice that there are two types I can select from here. This proximity match which goes out and just looks for the best match inside the image, Photoshop’s way of selecting the source for you and then there is this other one that is called “Create Texture”. And if you use the Create Texture option, it is not going to be surrounded. It is not going to go up there and look for weird portions of the image and clone them in. You are not going to get those kinds of problems.

So, let me show you what you are going to get. If I would paint along this in same right here, for example, it is going to get overly blurry. What Photoshop does is it looks inside the paintbrush and it tries to basically average the pixels that are in there. it tries to create this little weird texture from inside the paintbrush and it is invariably so far as I configure. It is invariably too blurry. I have yet to be satisfied by that setting.

So, I do not use Create Texture but as I said, I do not want really use the spot healing brush either. I am going to go back to the healing brush tool, contrast that to the healing brush’s pattern option which is similar, still working from a texture. The difference is you created the texture and this could be extremely useful. Let me show you what I mean. The thing it does is that it frees you from having to sample the image over and over again and it allows you to just set up a new tool sort of sample that works for anything and you can do this using the thing called the pattern maker.

So, what I am going to do is I am going to go up to the filter menu and I am going to choose this command right here, pattern maker and you can press this wider keys if you want to but I am just going to choose the pattern maker command and that brings up this big old pattern maker dialog box. Now, there is a ton of stuff going on inside this dialog box but we are going to ignore most of it. Because actually, this is a very easy feature to use, as long as you do not get overwhelmed by all these folder in the middle.

Here is what I want you to do. Just select sort of a representative neutral portion of the image that represents some of the film grain and some of the texture that is inside this face and so on. So, I am just going to select a little bit of the cheek, the same area that I have been healing from and then I am going to go up to this button right here. See this button that says generate, go ahead and click on it.

You will see a texture generated for you down here in the lower right hand corner of the dialog box and this will be a repeating texture that will repeat over the course of the image and if you like it, great! If you do not like it, just go ahead and click generate again. And you can keep clicking generate again over and over and over and over again until you get something that you really like.

Let us say, I like what I see right now. Once you get something you like, I want you to come down here and click on this itty, bitty, little save button here. It looks like a little floppy disk. Go ahead and click on it and then name your pattern. I am going to call mine neutral texture and then click “OK”.

Now, at this point, I want you to do something that might not occur to you. Instead of clicking the “OK” button, we have already saved the texture, we already have it ready to go so we do not need to click the “OK” button. If you did click the “OK” button, you would fill your entire image with this repeating pattern which is the silliest thing on earth, so it is not something we want to do.

Instead, we just want to click “Cancel”. It might make you think that we will lose all of the stuff that we have done but we really will not. Just go ahead and click “Cancel” because our pattern is waiting for us.

Alright kids, now let us put that pattern in play.