Basic Adjustments 1

Macho Makeover

Spot Healing Brush, Healing Brush by Mama Shan 2007

The first thing that I am going to do with this image is to zoom in, and see if there is any clean up necessary. And so, you can grab your Zoom Tool, and just click a couple of times, and then look at the face first, my pallet is over here, not too close to the edge because I do not want them to dock again. And what we are going to start off using, from the Tool Bar, is the Spot Healing Brush. Now this is in CS3. If you are in CS2, you can use the Healing Brush which I will get to in a minute. But I am going to start off with the Spot Healing Brush. And that mode of this brush should be set to normal, and the type should be Proximity Match. You can leave sample all layers checked because you can use this tool on a separate layer, or you can do it directly on a pixel layer. There is really going to be no difference at this point. This is a duplicate image so I am going to do it directly on the background layer and I am going to zoom in, in a couple of areas where I am going to use the Spot Healing Tool.

What you want to do is find an area that you want to cover up, and you want to make the diameter of your brush maybe, a little bit bigger than the spot. Hoping the video will show you this spot here. And all you have to do is click, and release. And it will heal the spot. So I will do that over here too. I can make it a little smaller. And you will see me doing this throughout the video where the diameter is changing. And that is because I am clicking on the left and right square bracket keys. Those are on the keyboard next to the letter p, if you look to the right of the letter p, you will see the left bracket key and then after that, the right bracket key. So the left makes it smaller, right makes it bigger. So click and release, click and release, very simple to use, click and release, click and release.

So we are just going over some of these areas with our Spot Healing Tool. Click and release. If you have done up some healing and do not like that way that it looks, you can always use your Undo keyboard shortcut, which is Ctrl Z on a PC or command Z on a Macintosh. We get this a little bit smaller here, just push that in.

Now over here, I am going to use the Healing Brush. The Healing Brush requires an extra step. But sometimes you need to use it in lieu of the Spot Healing Brush. How you use that is very similar, it is exactly the same way as you use the Clone Stamp Tool.

First you have to source a good area by holding down you Alt key on the PC Option Key on the Mac, and you can see that little periscope grid there, and click in the good area. So, click once, and then release the Option of Alt key, and release the mouse. And then hover over the area that you want to target from that source material. And again, I am working directly on the layer but you do have the options for working on a separate layer and then you just click, and notice where the cross here that is telling you where it is sourcing it from.

The options that I have set for the regular Healing Brush again normal, sampled through the source. I do not use the Align Check Box and sample current and below. Let me create a new layer by clicking the new layer icon in the layers pallet to show you how this works. If you do it on a separate layer, make sure that you do have the option set to current and below. If you have it set to just Current Layer, it is not going to source anything because there is nothing on the Current Layer. So Current Layer and below, and we will come down here, there is a little bit of a scar or mark here that I want to get rid off so I am going to Alt click on this area up here. Alt click and release both the key and the mouse, and then I am going to move directly down here.

Now, if I click and hold and drag, notice how the cross here is following my brush diameter. This is aligned so as long as I keep the mouse held down, it is working in that aligned fashion then release and it will update. And I like it that way because often times if you have aligned on and you are clicking and holding and dragging, that cross here may go into an area that you do not want to use as the target. By having it unchecked, you can release the mouse, click again, and see how the cross here is still at that origin point. Now if I had a line check, it would pick up right where I left off. So, I find that that this is a little bit more versatile.

I do not have to resource at this point. This area up here is a good source of skin. Now when the texture starts to change, say I want to delete this mole over here, the texture of this skin over here does not show as much of the pores as is over here. I am just going to add a couple more of pores here, Alt Option click again. So I will Alt or Option click in this area of the skin, and then click. And this is putting this on layer one.

And I am going to merge this into the background. Because I am working on a duplicate image, it is not quite as necessary to keep all separate layers intact. We may leave a few intact on this but we can flatten as we go. So I can use two commands from the Fly Out tab of the layers pallet which is up here. I can choose either merge down or flatten image. At this point in time, both are going to result in the same thing. I am just going to be back to one background layer.

And let me go back to the Spot Healing Brush, make it a little bit smaller, click here, click here. You also want to check your background too because often if you have a dirty lens, you might find some material out here. I am using the spacebar which toggles the Hand Tool. So holding the spacebar down and clicking your mouse will allow you to click and drag around the image. A little bit of dust here, I am just clicking with that Spot Healing Tool, one step wonder here, just want to come up to all parts of the image. There is a little one there.

And I am going to use a Ctrl minus to zoom back out here. I can do a little bit more on the nose. I am seeing a little spot here. And we try the Spot Healing Brush on that, see if it is to my liking, it still looks a little spotty. So I am going to come back over to the Healing Brush actually and source this area right here. Option Alt click and then just paint over this area here. Option Alt click, option Alt click, option Alt click and click that, that, option Alt click and click.

Okay. That is about all we need to do for healing that I can say. If we need to do something later, and we will still be able to do it.