Photoshop: Learning the Tools

Post 3 – Photoshop Learning the Tools

 

Spot Healing Brush Tool – This tool is used a lot in the fashion and media industry to try to improve the appearance of somebody in a photograph. Using this industry as an example, when you use the spot healing brush, it will take the area you select and use the pixels surrounding that area to recolour, or touch-up the photo. The result is an area of redness, or an impurity of the skin, is replaced by the persons skin colour so as to look blemish free.

Healing Brush Tool – The healing brush differs slight from the spot healing brush. It is used for the same purpose but you first select any area of the photo which you want to reuse somewhere else. The brush is then set to the same as the pixels in the area you have selected and you can then recreate this on another area of the photo. You could, for instance, select the hair from a person’s head and then the healing brush would brush hair onto maybe a bald person’s head if you wished.

Patch Tool – With this tool you first draw out the area you wish to change in a photo, and then you can drag the selection to anywhere else in the photograph. When you have found an area you are looking for it will then be recreated, using a combination of the pixels properties in the original area, and those in the new area, to alter the photo. You could use this if there was something in a photo you wanted to hide perhaps. Taking another plain part of the image, which may just show landscape for instance, would cause the pixels to blend together and likely hide the unwanted article. I used the patch tool to cover up some tracks in the sand made by a vehicle, and replaced them with an area of unspoilt sand from within the photo of a desert landscape.

Content Aware Move Tool – This tool will allow you to move something from one area of a photo to another whilst also considering the pixels in the area you are moving the content from. I used this to move a truck in the desert to another area of the photo. Because you are moving it to a different area, something must be done to the area the truck came from otherwise it would be obvious the photo had been tampered with. The content aware tool will consider the pixels around the area you are moving your selection and try to blend them together to leave a more natural look from where the truck is moved.

Brush Tool and Pencil Tool – The brush tool and pencil tool allows you to change the colour of areas of the photograph, either across the entire image or by selecting a smaller part of the image first and then applying the brush tool afterwards. In an outdoor image you could select the sky and change the appearance of the time of day, through a variety of different brushes and using different tints of colour from the colour swatches.