You may have seen some undesirable points such as hot pixel, flare, dust, etc in your digital photos. These bad spots can be easily removed by using healing tool in Adobe Photoshop. This tutorial will demonstrate you how to remove undesirable spot from your shot.

Photograph info: Location Budhamondhol Thailand.

From the photo above, I took this photo with long shutter speed and you can see that there are some flares and hot pixels in my photo. These unattractive points can be removed easily by using “Healing Tool” in Adobe Photoshop. You can see the example after applying healing tool as shown below.

Click “Healing Tool” on the tool pallet or press “J” to select it.

You can see that there are 4 types of “Healing Tool”; however you need to use only 3 tools as follow;

Spot Healing Brush Tool

Healing Brush Tool

Patch Tool

The last one is “Red Eye Tool” which is used to correct red eye causing by flash gun. Hence, this tool will be skipped from this tutorial.

1) I will start with “Spot Healing Brush Tool” . After you select this tool, click brush property which is at the top right corner to see brush’s property. You can adjust size of brush, hardness, spacing, etc.

Normally, I adjust only the diameter of brush to cover each spot, just a little bit bigger, but for the other properties; I still leave as per default valves.

This is my flare.

Adjust size of brush a little bit bigger than flare and then click where the spots you want to remove. The tool will try to find adjacent color and blend into brush area.

You can see that the flare is gone.

2) The second one is Healing Brush Tool.

Select Healing Brush Tool , click brush property which is at the top right corner to see brush’s property. You can adjust size of brush, hardness, spacing, etc.

I normally adjust brush size just big enough to cover area where I need to remove bad spots.

This is another flare that I would like to remove.

The concept of Healing Brush Tool. is to use color from sample area, which we need to determine, and blend into area where the Healing Brush Tool was painted. You may get confused what this is about. Let’s look at the example below.

Select this tool, hold “Alt” key and click the sample area which should have similar color.

Then paint around the flare as show in this photo.

After that, Photoshop will use blend color nicely so you will see that the flare is gone.

3) The last one is Patch Tool. When using the Patch Tool, you need to create selection area around where you want and drag that selection to area where has similar color. Photoshop will use the color inside selection to paint over your selection.

Let’s see the example. Select this tool and make selection around the flare.

Drag the selection over area which has similar color.

Then Photoshop will do its excellent job as you can see.

Look overall photo (100% zoom) and you may see hot pixel due to long shutter speed.

For these small spot, I would rather use Spot Healing Brush Tool to fix the problem. After I remove all hot pixels, you can see before-and-after photo shown below.

Finally, this tutorial is an example of how to use the “Healing Tool” in Adobe Photoshop to remove some spots. Anyway, the way how to correct undesirable spots of each photo is different but the concept of using tool is the same. Let’s try the Healing Tool to help you remove some undesired spots out of your nice photos.

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