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[This video is part of Adobe Photoshop Elements 9: Learn by Video]
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[Male] In this lesson, I'm going to share a bit of magic with you.
I realize that might sound a little melodramatic,
but when you want to clean up a blemish in an image,
the healing tools in Elements seem truly magical.
Simply paint over an area you want to clean up, and in most cases,
that area can be cleaned up completely automatically.
These tools are typically demonstrated using a portrait.
That makes perfect sense, considering anyone who has their picture taken
wants that photo to look as good as possible.
But I'm going to start out by demonstrating these tools with an image
that is most certainly not a portrait to help demonstrate
just how flexible these tools really are.
In this case, there are a couple of dust spots that are present caused by dust
on the imaging sensor in the camera.
There's a really dark one over here and another one that's not quite as dark here,
and I'm sure if I looked around I could find some others as well.
Also, I feel that this bird in the sky is a little bit distracting,
so I'm going to clean up these areas with the Spot Healing Brush,
and I think you'll be impressed just how fast it is.
In the case of the Spot Healing Brush, I'm generally cleaning up small blemishes
that I definitely want to get rid of, so in this case,
I'll often work directly on my background image layer rather than creating
a new layer to apply the cleanup to.
I'll just make sure that I'm paying attention while working to make sure
that the effect I'm achieving is a good one.
I'll choose the Spot Healing Brush from the toolbox.
Taking a look at the Options bar, we don't need to worry about the brush so much
because the tool will automatically blend with surroundings.
But I generally use a hard-edged brush to help make the job
of the Spot Healing Brush just a little bit easier.
The size is not critical at this point because we'll use a keyboard shortcut
to adjust the size of the brush while we're working.
For type, I'll almost always want to use Content Aware.
Proximity Match will look for pixels surrounding the area that I'm trying to clean up.
Content Aware takes that a bit further
and will actually manipulate the pixels as they're being drawn.
I never use the Create Texture option with a photographic image.
In general, I recommend using Content Aware in all cases,
only switching to Proximity Match if you're finding some problems
with the results achieved using Content Aware.
Frankly, I doubt that will ever be the case.
If you do choose to work on a separate layer, you'll need to turn on
the Sample All Layers check box, then be sure that you turn off the visibility
of any adjustment layers so that the cleanup pixels are not affected twice.
Using the Spot Healing Brush is then incredibly simple.
We'll start with this dust spot over here on the left side of the image.
I'll increase the brush size using the right square bracket to increase the brush size,
or as needed, the left square bracket to reduce the brush size.
I want to make sure the brush is approximately the size of the object I'm trying to clean up.
I'll then click and drag around just a little bit,
making sure I'm covering up the entire area of the blemish.
While painting, as you can see, a dark overlay appears on the image.
When I release the mouse, however, Elements will set to work cleaning up that area instantly
and the spot is gone and perfectly blended in with the surroundings.
I can accomplish the same thing with the bird.
I'll reduce the size of the brush just a little bit here
and then click and paint slightly over the bird, and when I release the mouse
the bird disappears.
Taking things a step further, let's take a look at the letters on the front of this building.
Now in this case, obviously, I don't want to get rid of these letters,
but let's just assume that we did.
I want to demonstrate just how powerful this tool really is.
I'll press the left square bracket key a few times in this case
in order to reduce the brush so it's only about as large as the area I'm trying to clean up.
In this case, about as large as the strokes of the letters.
I'll then click and drag to paint over all areas that represent this particular letter.
When I'm finished covering up that area, I'll release the mouse
and that area of the image magically disappears.
Even better, you can see that the texture has been replaced
to match the surrounding area.
I do see that there's one small area that looks a little bit obvious,
so I can simply click and paint over that area one more time to help blend it in.
I could continue working in this way to remove all of the letters if I wanted to.
Obviously, I don't really want to in this case.
I just wanted to show you how cool this tool can really be.
