Healing Versus Cloning
The Healing Brush is designed to help you remove flaws from an image, such as scratches in a photo or age lines in a person's face. You essentially paint the flawed area with pixels that you pick up from another part of the image. For example, if a person has wrinkles at the edges of his or her eyes, you can sample an area of skin on the forehead that has no such flaws. When you paint over the wrinkles, you cover the blemish. It's a technique that has been used by Clone-tool jockeys for years. The difference between the Clone tool and the Healing Brush is that the Healing Brush does the painting with a lot more intelligence than the Clone tool. Instead of just dropping the pixels from the sample area onto the flaw you're correcting, the Healing Brush uses the texture of the sampled area and applies the tonal characteristics of the area around the flaw. You still need to sample an area with the same basic color as the area around the flaw, but you needn't worry about matching the color exactly, as you must do with the Clone tool. Use of the Clone tool sometimes provides a dead giveaway: If you paint out a flaw with a sampled area that differs even slightly in color, a line of demarcation is visible where you paint (see Figure 2). Becoming proficient at Cloning basically consists of learning several techniques for dealing with this problem. The Healing Brush avoids this problem with its ability to blend to the area you're painting.
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