How to Use the Patch Tool in Photoshop

Hi, guys. Yanik here for Yanik’s Photo School and today we’re going to be back in Photoshop looking at a tool called the patch tool. Now none a lot of people are using the patch tool and they probably should and I love that tool and I use it lot and sometimes it’s even more than the healing rush. Now, the patch tool is basically a healing brush with a selection that you’ve made instead of brushing and you’re making it a selection like the selection tool and then dragging it over to where you want the effect to take place with.

Now, we’re going to go be looking at the patch tool today with two examples, one to remove bags under the eyes of a fashion model and the other to remove unwanted clouds in the sky. So you don’t necessarily always have to use it on the skin, it can be used elsewhere as well and I want to show you that too.

Alright let’s get right to it. First of all, where do we find the patch tool? Now since it’s a healing brush type of tool, it’s going to be under the healing brush icon. So going here into your menu, you see the healing brush icon here just click and hold and third one down it’s called the patch tool and it has the shape of a patch and even your cursor changes to that shape as well.

Now, let’s zoom in on the eyes here and beautiful eyes but we want to remove those patches under here, those wrinkles because we are doing fashion but I’m not the kind of guy that will remove everything so I want to create a duplicate layer here and I’m doing control J and what we’re going to do is select. So it’s basically just a selection, click and hold and drag like so and then what you want to do when inside your selection you want to click and drag it out to where you want the texture of the effect to take place like so.

If I do control D for D select you can see the effect it has. Now, it’s too much and you would have to go back in and get some of that texture back in but what I prefer doing and I’ll show you that after I’ve done the other eye is just to remove the opacity of that layer. So do let’s do the effect in the eye here and drag it down and Control D, select and a little spot here and let’s do that and a little spot here and D select and there we go.

Here into our layers pallet, go to opacity and bring some subtle lines back in and like so and if you look at before and after it’s very, very subtle but we still have some human like qualities to the eyes without having it the Barbie look and we’ve just using the patch tool we’ve just reduce the amount of patches under the eyes so dark circle over the wrinkles under the eye. And that’s how I would use the patch tool on a fashion model.

Now, let me just open the second image which is a nature scene I took recently in Mexico while I was doing a Mexico shoot and the little thing that’s bothering me well those little dark clouds spotted all over and let me just do it a 100%. Select my patch tool then just select those patch, move it out, select, move it out and just put the spot here. Move it and I find it a lot easier to do than using the healing brush clicking Alt selecting then brushing it in like so.

And actually it didn’t work because I had the D select. Then I will just brush it in like so and I find it more time consuming than using the patch tool where you can just go in. Select room and you can do a bigger selection if you want and move it out and the small one over here and there we go and if I zoom back out and how about read all of these clouds if I look at A and before and after before and after it took me 2-1/2 seconds with the patch tool to remove unwanted clouds in the nature scene.

As you can see it’s the prettiest and it will be used and it’s not that complicated, so go ahead and practice it and tell me what you think. Yanik Chauvin, signing out for Yanik’s Photo School.