Saturday, December 25, 2010

Note on Spot Healing Brush

A seemingly excellent innovation in Photoshop which appeared a couple of versions ago is the Spot Healing Brush. It means that unlike the normal Healing Brush, you don't have to find and select a section for the brush to use as a texture to cover the flaws you want removed. Instead it just compares to the immediate surroundings and removes the spot. Saves time.

Or it should. I just find that it is really poor. If a spot (say, a pimple) is close to an edge in the picture, that edge will usually get a ghost in the area you have Healed. And often, sometimes the brush simply removes all texture in the area, which just doesn't work, it looks like a clumsily airbrushed area.

I find it remarkable that such a central tool continues to work so poorly through several upgrades of Photoshop. When you think of the prices Adobe commands for their apps, they just mess up a little too often.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree 100 per cent.

Chris

Gil said...

This feature on Apple's "Aperture" product works quite well. I'd say I get a 'ghost' problem once or twice every ten times, and in those cases I use 'clone' instead of 'repair', and pick my source spot manually.

I've always felt that Aperture does all that I need for much, much less than the Adobe family of products. I know that some need 'more professional' features, but for me, Aperture is as professional as it needs to be, especially now that it's been through a few generations.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Yes, they say that both Aperture and Lightroom are now excellent products that handle most of what most people need. And I actually have both, but at this point I just don't have the patience to learn a new interface and new workflows. So it's my own doing, I'm stuck in my ways.