Spot Healing Brush

The Spot Healing Brush is a fairly recent addition to the Content-Aware options. Using this option means the Spot Healing Brush works more intelligently and does a better job than the original tool. I don’t fully understand how it does such a better job—nor do I care! It just works better.

Here’s an interesting—and fast—way to use the Spot Healing Brush tool: Heal along a path. If you have a photo with a series of drooping electrical wires, as shown in Figure 2.37, you can use a more automated method of removing them compared to manually painting with the Spot Healing Brush

Figure 2.37 The Spot Healing Brush can remove these electrical wires.

Use the Pen tool to create a path that mimics the droop of the electrical line.

Figure 2.38 Start by creating a path with the Pen tool.

Select the Spot Healing Brush and use the Options bar to set the size of the brush just slightly larger than the electrical line. Option-click (Mac) or Alt-click (Windows) the (second) stroke path in the Paths panel. In the Stroke Path dialog, change the tool to the Spot Healing Brush (Figure 2.39).

Figure 2.39 The Stroke Path dialog with the Spot Healing Brush selected.

Figure 2.40 Once one wire is removed, you can easily remove the others.

Then with the Path Selection tool, Option-drag (Mac) or Alt-drag (Windows) the path over the next electrical line, and repeat the stroke path with brush operation. Do this as many times as you need to remove all the electrical lines (Figure 2.40).

Broken Record Alert! Once again, use this automation technique to do as much of the work as possible, and tweak where necessary. In this example, the edge of the wires could still use a little work but, say it with me: “compared to the alternative...”