A Quick Introduction to the Healing Brush in Photoshop

If you're new to Photoshop, one of the tools you'll want to become familiar with as soon as possible is the Healing Brush. This quick and helpful tutorial will show you just why it's so useful and how you can take advantage of it in a wide range of situations, from retouching portraits to removing items in landscape shots.

Coming to you from Nathaniel Dodson of tutvid, this video will get you up and running with the Healing Brush. Though it's a powerful tool, it has some quirks, and it's good to know those characteristics as well as how to work with it non-destructively, how to deal with edges, control its sampling and output behavior, and more. As Dodson points out, be sure to create a new layer, as it's exceedingly rare that you'll want to do any of your retouching directly on an image, and creating a separate layer allows you to mask changes in and out as needed whenever instead of being stuck with what you've done. The tool's usefulness extends well beyond retouching portraits, and with a little tweaking of its parameters and a good understanding of its function, there are few situations it can't handle. 

Alex Cooke's picture

Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

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2 Comments

Interesting take.. I think he uses a brush way too big for the types of fixes he's attempting to do.

+10 points for talking at such a nice clip. Others would have made this a torturous 25 minute video that I would have just dumped out of after two minutes.