Repair with the Brush Tool

This Photoshop tutorial with Karsten Franke shows how to remove dust spots, scratches and imperfections using Photoshop’s Healing Brush Tool.

Franke starts with the necessary steps to preparing an image before retouching by pointing out the best way to protect your original image is to do all retouching work on a duplicate layer of the original image.

The healing brush tool corrects imperfections, causing them to disappear into the adjacent image by painting with sampled pixels from an image or pattern. Additionally, the healing brush also matches the texture, lighting, transparency, and shading of the sampled pixels to the pixels being healed in either aligned or non-aligned mode. As a result, the repaired pixels blend realistically with the rest of the image.

In conclusion, Franke notes that working with the healing brush is similar to using the clone stamp tool. However, as you move the healing brush over the area to be "healed" it produces a temporary blurred effect until the computer has time to calculate the finished result. For those not yet familiar with this tool the healing brush speeds up retouching immensely, brushing away imperfections, producing natural, almost magical results.