Removing Dust & Defects

Key Concepts

Cloning

The way retouching has been done from the very early versions of Photoshop is by “cloning” pixels from one part of an image and using them to obscure blemishes we don’t want. The mechanism is a tool that uses a brush metaphor, called the Clone Stamp Tool in Photoshop, or Spot Removal in Lightroom and ACR. Quite simply, it is like very quickly selecting an area, copying it, then pasting it elsewhere. In nondestructive workflows, including those involving Smart Objects, the cloned pixels go onto their own layer above our source image.

Healing

An advancement over cloning, the healing function uses the same painting procedure as cloning—but rather than only making identical copies, it then blends them ...

Get Photoshop CC and Lightroom now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.