7 Healing Brush
Used for seamless
merging of cloned image data
Found at #4 in the Toolbar diagram at left
The healing brush and patch tool are grouped together in the toolbar.
If the healing brush is not visible, click on the icon of the patch tool
in the toolbar, and choose the healing brush from the pop-up menu.
When you have the Sampled radio button chosen on the tool’s options
bar, use this tool in the same way that you use the clone stamp. First,
choose a brush shape and size by clicking on the brush thumbnail on the
options bar. Unlike most of the other painting tools in Photoshop 7, this
brush does not use the new mega-brushes engine. You build a brush using
the old pre-7 brush options palette. If you’ve never seen previous
versions of Photoshop, this palette used to be the only way you could
customize brush tip application.
The Diameter sets the brushes total size. Hardness sets how much fuzziness
or feathering there is on the edges of the brush. Spacing determines how
often each brush ‘footprint’ is laid down. At the default 25 %
the brush tips give the appearance of a solid line. At greater settings,
you will begin to see gaps between the tip imprints.
You can either type values into the Angle and Roundness text boxes, or drag on dots or arrowhead in the proxy image on the left to reshape the brush tip. From the Size menu, you can choose Pen Pressure, or Stylus Wheel if you have a tablet hooked up to your computer.
After choosing a brush, press the Alt key and click on the spot in your picture from which you want to copy image data. Then paint with that copied image data over the spot that you want to cover.
Note that you can limit the area that paint can be applied to by making a selection and then painting inside it. Paint will only appear within the selections outline, even if you drag over areas outside of it. This can be especially helpful if you are using the healing brush near sharp edges in a photograph. It does strange and terrible things if you brush too near a sharp boundary.
Straight lines can be painted by clicking once in the image where the line should begin, and then Shift-clicking where you would like the line to end.
A shortcut for changing brush sizes while using any of the painting tools is to press the left bracket [ to decrease brush size, and the right bracket ] to move to the next larger brush.
Right-click on the image and the brushes pop-up palette will appear next to your cursor. Press Enter or click on your document’s title bar to close the palette after you’ve edited the brush settings.
If you choose Edit > Fade immediately after using this tool, you can change the opacity of the strokes you have just applied. In addition, though you cannot apply this tool to an empty layer as you can with the clone stamp (which has a Use All Layers option), you can duplicate your image layer and edit that, or use the history brush to edit your healing brush strokes.
Right-clicking on the image while using this tool will open its brush
palette (shown above) next to your cursor. Shift-right-clicking will bring
up a menu with most of the options bar choices.
If you have chosen “brush size” in Display & Cursors preferences, (find at Edit > Preferences > Display & Cursors ), you can toggle to “precise” by pressing Caps Lock. If you have your preference set to “precise”, it will toggle to “brush size”. A preference of “standard” will go to “precise” when Caps Lock is pressed.
The keyboard shortcut key for the healing brush is the letter J. Toggle between the healing brush and the patch tool by pressing the Shift key, and the shortcut letter.
The illustration below is the healing brush options bar. Find any tool presets that exist for this tool by clicking on the tool’s icon on the left end of the options bar. To choose a brush click on the brush thumbnail or the little down arrow to its right. Use the pop-up palette as described above.
Only a few of the blend Modes are available for this
tool, though they include all of the more useful cloning blends.
Click the Pattern radio button to heal with a pattern. This might be useful for adding an even texture to an area that is too smooth (similar to using Add Noise to add texture).
Checking the Aligned option will cause your sample area to parallel your paint strokes even if you stop and start repeatedly. When Aligned is not checked, each new stroke will apply copied data beginning at the same original sample spot.
If you have doodled with a tool’s options and want to get back to the default settings, right-click that tool’s icon at the far left end of its options bar (Photoshop 6 users left-click). Choose either Reset Tool to reset only the current tool, or Reset All Tools to restore default settings to every tool.
Please note that all descriptions, and illustrations featured refer to files which are in Photoshop’s .psd format, and which are in RGB color mode. Other file formats, and color modes may generate different options. Some Photoshop features are not available for images not in .psd format, or RGB color mode. To find what color mode your image is in, choose Image > Mode.
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