So, we have now seen the cloned stamp tool. We have seen the spot healing brush. We have seen the regular, normal healing brush and we have seen how to use the regular healing brush both to clone portions of the image and to paint from a repeating pattern.

There is one more healing tool inside of Photoshop CS2 and that is this guy, right here, the patch tool.

The patch tool allows you to heal selected areas inside the image, so you actually select the portion of the image and then heal that selection. Here, let me show you how it works. I am going to drag up this portion of the image. Let us try to heal this stuff around the mouth here. Some of the biggest tears in this face here, some of the biggest aberrations. And I am just going to sort of drag around it.

Now, in the next lesson, we are going to start talking about selection outlines and the patch tool works basically like the lasso tool. That is to say, you just drag around the area that you want to select. So, I have just circled that area with the tool then I release to generate the selection outline, these marching ends, this little animated selection outline. Then, I will drag inside the selection outline and notice as I drag, it is previewing, not only am I moving the selection to a new location but it is previewing how that selection is going to fit into the patched area. And as soon as I get something that I like, I might try something over in this area instead here. Once I get something I like, I just release.

And then to see whether I like the effect or not, I will go to the View menu and I will choose the “Extras” command in order to turn it off. Or I could press “Command+H” or “Ctrl+H” on the PC in order to hide that selection outline. The patch is still there in case I decide I want to move it a little more but I can get a sense of whether I like my patch or not. And in fact, I love my patch. I think my patch is great.

Now, notice that you have other patch options as well. So, not only can you patch from the source which is what I did, I could change the equation and patch from the destination. In other words, I drag around a bit of source stuff, turn onto destination option and drag it over something that I want to patch. Alright, so I could work the opposite way too if I want to.

And then, finally, I will go ahead and turn on source again. Finally, I can select an area that I want to heal like this area down here and I could heal it with a pattern. So, I will just go ahead and click this little down pointing arrowhead select my neutral pattern, and then click on the “Use Pattern” button in order to use it to heal the selection. It works great! And by the way, I can heal any kind of selection. I do not have to use the patch tool in order to select an area. I could use one of the other selection tools instead.

I could use, for example, the rectangular marquee tool. Just go ahead and select an area that I want to use as a patch for example, get my patch tool, set it to destination and then drag that marquee over an area that needs to be patched. That does not happen to be the most terribly successful of all my patches, so I will go ahead and undo it. But there are many, many different ways to work with the patch tool inside the Photoshop.

Alright. There are just a couple of more things I want to show you about the dear old patch tool. I am going to set that back to source here inside the options bar. Another way to select with the tool, if you are finding dragging with the tool to be a little hard and you are having difficulty controlling emotions especially if you are using a mouse and it is just a big hulking mouse and you are having problems controlling. Well then, there is another way to work. If you press the “Option” key or the “Alt” key on the PC and click with the tool, notice that you can actually create the straight sided selection outline like so.

Then release the “Option” key or the “Alt” key in order to complete the selection, so you just have to click that way. As long as the Option or Alt key is down, you can just click away to create a stra