The default settings provide a round brush, size variable with pressure at 100% Hardness. Unlike the Clone Stamp that allows the user to choose from the default brush set, the Healing Brush uses it’s own brush technology. The first option to consider is Brush Size. Instead it replaced the boxes with the seashell texture with slight variations in value from the original source caused because the values of some of the colored boxes are darker than most of the values in the seashell texture. In the last example, the brush was larger than the colored boxes, so Photoshop didn’t use any of the colors. The smaller brush left more surrounding color so more was used in the blend. The amount of color used was based upon how much color was left in the surroundings. Depending on the size of the brush used, the colors of the boxes were averaged and merged with the seashell texture in order to blend them all together using the seashells as the desired texture. In this case the source was the seashells in the background. If the source area contains a texture, the Healing Brush will work with that texture plus average the colors and values of the surrounding areas: When the brush size was larger than the original boxes, the boxes were “removed”, replaced with the white background.

You can see that Photoshop has tried to average the surrounding colors and values into the center of the area that was being retouched. The black circles represent the size of the brush that was used.

The source was set (Option / Alt tap) to copy the smooth, white background and transfer it into the center of the colored boxes. Here’s an example of the Healing Brush in action: The tool is designed to retouch unwanted dust spots, blemishes, scratches, stray hairs and other small image imperfections, like the Clone Stamp Tool but it is much easier, especially for new users, to work with. More from our Popular Tools in Photoshop series:

Blending brush photoshop free download