Photoshop CS5 – Spot Healing Brush Tool – Welcome Back from the Darkside

The Thermal Waters of Norris Geyser Basin, Yellowstone NP, © Jay Goodrich

Continuing my exploration of Adobe’s new CS5 Master Collection from a recent first post of ours, I have discovered a newly reinvented friend in Photoshop CS5. The Spot Healing Brush Tool has, up until now, never been my favorite tool to fix and remove dust, branches, etc. from an image. It just never seemed to get it right, unless I was using it to clone dust out of a clear blue sky. Now Adobe has brought this tool back from the “Darkside” and in the process made my job of cloning things out of an image almost too easy. If you roll over the above image you will see what I am talking about. In the past cleaning up an image like the above one would have taken hours and the use of multiple tools and possibly layers to get everything right. This morning it was about a 15 minute project and the new image looks almost perfect.

The key to the Spot Healing Brush is in one of the dialogs at the tool’s top menu named Type. In this dialog, a new option has surfaced and it is aptly named Content-Aware. I have to tell you that it works like magic. I don’t know how those brainiac people at Adobe came up with this one, but it is truly amazing to work with on an image.

A simple click and drag is all it took to remove all of the unwanted items in the above photograph. The image above is about color, texture, and lines. With the Content-Aware option for the Spot Healing Brush Tool I was able to make the image solely about that and not about the sticks that have made their way into the waters over time. Soon I will discuss using another tool where this option exists and works just as amazingly–Content-Aware Fill. It allows you to fill any selection and it works like magic too!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 9th, 2010 at 9:29 pm. It is filed under news, photography tips, reviews and tagged with Adobe Photoshop CS5, Content-Aware, Spot Healing Brush Tool, tips, tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.