How to Remove a Blemish From a Photo Using Photoshop Elements 15

During this Photoshop Elements 15 tutorial video, you will learn how to remove blemishes and unwanted objects in an image by using a spot healing brush and a healing brush.

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Hello again and welcome back to our course on PSE 15.

In this section we’re going to look at removing blemishes form images. We’re going to start with very small blemishes and then we’re going to work from blemishes up to quite substantial objects. And in fact there are a couple of other sections later on where we’re going to remove things from images but where we may need to something else to compensate for the removal.

The first thing I’m going to do here is to point out to you one of the Guided Edits. In the Special Edit section there is a Scratches and Blemishes Guided Edit. When we’re dealing with blemishes in Guided Edit we basically use either the Spot Healing brush for the smallest flaws or the Healing Brush for larger flaws. And much earlier on in the course I did mention removing some specks from this dog’s face and also a bigger problem of a light spot by its left eye, our right eye as we look at it.

So that’s typical of the sort of flaw you may want to remove, although we are going to remove bigger things than that from images. But on this occasion we’re going to remove these blemishes in Expert Edit Mode. But do try to find time to try the Guided Edit version of this particular fix.

So first of all let me zoom in to the flaws, the smallest flaws on the dog’s face. They’re by its right eye, the left eye as we look at it. You can see some of the specks there. But all I’m going to use for these is the Spot Healing Brush. So I go to the Enhance Group, find that spot healing brush. The main tool here is the brush itself.

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And what I want to do is to choose a size for the brush. Now the ideal size for healing tiny little specks like this is a brush size that’s just slightly bigger than the specks themselves. So if I hover over that that brush is much too big for healing the spots. I can make the brush smaller by using the slider but also there are one or two keyboard shortcuts that I use quite a bit even though I don’t use them much when I’m creating courses.

One of them is the square brackets on the keyboard. The left one makes the brush smaller. The right one makes it bigger. And sometimes rather than use the slider but using that keyboard shortcut is an ideal way of getting the right brush size. So that one will be just about right. It’s right over the blemish.

Now if I click that blemish has gone and I can click on the other blemishes as well. And by choosing a brush size that’s only slightly bigger than the blemishes I cause the minimum of what you might loosely call peripheral damage.

There’s a very important option when you’re using the spot healing brush to do with how it’s going to put in the pixels that replace the ones you’re removing. And you have three choices. You have Proximity Match which looks at the color of local pixels and fills in accordingly. You have Create Texture where again it looks at the local pixels in and around the selection and just creates a sort of texture to fill it in.

And then Content Aware which is something we’re going to be seeing quite a bit as we go through the next few sections where PSE looks more broadly at what’s around and tries to work out how best to fill in the space that was occupied by the blemish. Now of course it’s not possible to generally say one of those is better than the other. You need to try them in each situation. And with some practice you’ll probably get quite good at choosing which of those is the best choice in any given situation.

Another important setting here, and this is one that we’re going to see very often, is Sample All Layers. In this particular case we only have one layer but if you were working on an image with multiple layers and possibly with actual content in many layers not just adjustment layers and so on, you may in some instances need to sample all layers to perform a particular correction because the correction needs to be applied to all layers or it may just be one layer.

So for instance if this picture of the dog were just in the background layer you wouldn’t need to sample all layers for all of the other layers in the image if none of them were basically doing anything to the picture of the dog. Maybe they might be doing a color adjustment or something but they wouldn’t actually have the speck on themselves. You only have to fix in that case the layer which has got the blemish on it.

Again it’s not possible to generalize here. You need to look at each situation and say, “Do I need to sample all layers or do I only need to sample the current layer that I’m working on?”

So I’m going to leave you to experiment with the spot healing brush or possibly the healing brush to remove that little light flare from the dog’s left eye. And we’ll turn our attention to a different sort of problem altogether.

What you can see here is one of the most common problems in images and that is the dreaded wire. It can be a telephone wire. It can be as in this case part of a fence. But it’s a common problem and nowadays sometimes it’s just difficult to get a picture of something without a wire being in the way. And you can use the spot healing brush to remove wire. However, once again it’s something that needs a bit of practice and you need to look at each situation on its own merits.

If you wanted to remove this wire using the spot healing brush and follow the instructions I gave you just now you’d make the brush a little bit wider than the wire. You’d wipe along the wire and hey presto it’s gone. That does need a very, very steady hand. And the problem is that one tends then to make the brush a little bit bigger than it needs to be so that if your hands not that steady you’re still going to capture the wire. That then tends to increase the amount of peripheral damage that you cause. So it’s quite a delicate balancing act to get the size of the brush right. So let’s just see how steady my hand is today.

I’ve got the spot healing brush selected. I’m going to put the cursor over the wire. Oh it’s much too small. So let me increase the size using the right square bracket keyboard shortcut. Okay that’s bigger than the wire. That looks fine. Now let me see how steady handed I can be. Now as I’m doing this you may be worried by that line and thinking it’s not really going to leave that mark is it and the answer is no it isn’t.

It just shows you where you’ve gone. I made a mistake there but let’s just carry on anyway. Get to the end, release the mouse. I think that’s not bad really. I think anybody coming to this picture from cold would have no idea there ever a piece of wire there. But you can see the problem. If you’ve got a steady hand hopefully you can get results that are as good as that.

Now I’ve done that using the Proximity Match setting and although I’m quite happy with that one sometimes you’ll do it and you’ll need to undo what you’ve done if it’s not good enough and try one of the other settings. What I’m going to do now is to remove a couple of these other bits of wire using the same approach and I’ll see whether I need to change the replacement setting there from Proximity Match. So join me again in just a moment.
So once again I’ve done that wire removal. I think that’s not bad. I can’t really see any of evidence of wire there.

The next thing that I’m going to remove from this picture though is a little bit of a trickier job. I want to remove this post in the bottom right hand corner of the image. And that’s not really a job for the spot healing brush. It’s a little bit too big for that but it is something that I can attempt with the healing brush.

The healing brush works on a completely different principle to the spot healing brush because the healing brush requires you to take a sample of something to replace it with. Now this best works when you’ve got an object which is on a fairly uniform background, perhaps something against a whole wall or a whole field or something, and you’ve got plenty to sample from.

The situation here is not an ideal one but I want to show you how to use it in this situation and we’ll see if I can come up with a reasonably good way of removing that post using the healing brush in this picture. It’s a bit of a tricky one actually.

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So having selected the healing brush I set my brush size. And the brush size is basically going to determine how big the sample that I take is. So I’m going to take something a little bit bigger than that. I’ll use the square bracket again.

So the way this works is I take a sample first. So if I take something from the middle of all this sort of brushwood here, hold the Alt key down on the keyboard and click. That is now my sample. Now let me click on the object that I want to remove. And what it’s going to do is cover it with what I’ve sampled.

Now what I would generally do here is do this a few times. So let’s take a different sample somewhere else and maybe dab that on in a few different places. Now I do accept that that’s not great but as you can see, again somebody coming to this picture wouldn’t necessarily realize there was ever a post there. And if I spent a little bit more time on it, took a few more samples and clicked over that a little bit more I could probably make a sufficiently regular corner there that the healing brush would have done the job for me.

It’s certainly a good tool to try to remove small objects. And as I say, it works particularly well when you’ve got a good area to sample from.

That’s the end of this section. I’ll see you in the next one.

Simon Calder

Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA. He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!