Hi! And welcome to another session of The Mindful Eye Digital Darkroom. I’m Patti Schulze and in this session, I’m going to show you some shortcuts in using the healing brush in Adobe Lightroom.

In this image, I want to use the healing brush to remove some of the dust spots. I’m going to select the healing brush from the adjustment panel and then make sure heal is selected. And now on my image, in order to see those dust spots, I need to zoom in and I don’t have a lot of room on this size of my laptop, so I want to hide that right hand panel. I can do by pressing the F8 key. Now, I’m on a laptop, a McIntosh laptop, and so in order to use the F keys, I have to press the function key first. If you’re on a windows machine, I’m not sure that you have to do that. On desktop, you can just press the F key.

So now I’m ready to go and I also want to zoom in a little bit other than that big O black spot right there, I can’t see most of this dustpan is. So I want to zoom in and I can press either the command or CTRL and + sign to zoom in or I can use the navigator panel to select either one to one which zooms in for me or to two one. Now, the two to one I know that I’ll get a little better zoom in effect to see those a little clear.

The other thing I want to do is notice on the navigator panel that there’s a little box and that shows me where I am on the image. And to be consistent, I want to just zoom across or pan across all of the image kind of a consistent way so I don’t mess anything. Now I can press the HOME key and again, on my Mac laptop I first have to press the function key to get any of the HOME key to work. So if I press that, it moves me, as you can see to the top left hand corner of my image. So I’m ready to go. And right now, I don’t really see too many spots but what I want to do, I can press the spacebar to move around in my image. But again, like I said I want to make sure I have a consistent way of moving through the image. So I’m going to press the PAGE DOWN key. Again, on the MacIntosh, I have to use the function key. And notice, watch the navigator panel, that little square shows me that I’m just moving straight down on my image. There’s a little zest spot there and my healing brush is a little large. I’m going to use the left bracket to make it smaller and then just click to get rid of that. Let me just continue to use the page down to examine my image. And when I get down to the bottom of the image, you’ll notice that it bounces back up to the top, the next column of my image.

Well, on this particular image, I know that most of the dust spots are on that sky, so it would be little faster if I moved side to side rather than up and down. To do that, I’m going to press the CAP LOCKS. And now, when I press PAGE DOWN, look what happens. It’s moving to the right. And there is a little dust part right there. So I’ll just continue to use the PAGE DOWN looking for any dust spots. There’s a couple right there.

On last shortcut I want to show you is how to hide some of those brown spots from your healing brush. Let me click back into the fit so you can see all those little dust. Now, it’s not that destructing on this particular image, but if you have an image that has a lot of these spots and you can’t really see your image very well, press the H key and that will hide those circles for you. Don’t forget to press back the H key and show them again because the next time you use your healing brush, you won’t see them.

Well, I hope you enjoy this short little session on using the healing brush in Adobe Lightroom, thanks.