Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
big wooden post, but large areas like all those cones make it confused about what to use as re-
placement material. You could keep trying the Spot Healing Brush over and over, but at this
point it would be faster to use the Clone Stamp (page 318) to fix that area instead.
— Your best bet will usually be to try Content Aware first. If it doesn't do a good job,
undo what you did and try Proximity Match instead. Generally speaking, if Proximity
Match doesn't work well, you'll get better results by switching to the regular Healing
Brush (
The Healing Brush
) than by choosing Create Texture, although Adobe suggests
that you may get better results from Create Texture if you drag over a spot more than
once.
—
Brush
. You can use this drop-down menu to choose a different brush style (see
Chapter 12
for more about brushes), but you're usually best off sticking to the standard
brush that Elements starts with and just changing its size, if necessary.
—
Size
. This slider controls how big the brush cursor is. You want a brush just barely
wide enough to cover the blemish you're healing.
—
Sample All Layers
. Turn on this checkbox if you want the brush to look for replace-
ment material in all your photo's visible layers. If you leave it off, Elements uses material
from only the active layer. Be sure to turn this setting on if you created a new, blank layer
to heal on so you can blend your work in later by adjusting the healed area's opacity; oth-
erwise, Elements won't have any material to work with.
Sometimes you can get great results with the Spot Healing Brush on a large area
if
it's sur-
rounded by a field that's similar in tone to the spot you're trying to fix, especially if you use
the Content-Aware option, but you may find that you need to do extra work to get a perfect
result (see
Figure 9-3
). Sometimes you can switch to Proximity Match and finish up, or you
may need the regular Healing Brush (explained next) or the Clone Stamp (
The Clone Stamp
)
to get things just perfect.
The Healing Brush
The Healing Brush lets you fix much bigger areas than you can usually manage with the Spot
Healing Brush. The main difference between the two tools is that, with the Healing Brush,
