Summary: In this first look at one of the brand new features in Photoshop CS5, we check out the upgraded Spot Healing Brush with its new Content Aware Healing option and how an already great photo retouching tool just got a whole lot better!

Written by Steve Patterson
Exclusively for Photoshop Essentials.com.

Part of our complete collection of Photo Retouch tutorials.

In a previous photo retouching tutorial, we looked at Photoshop's Spot Healing Brush and how we can use it to quickly remove or repair small problem areas in an image, like acne or other minor skin blemishes, dust, dirt, mold, or small cracks or scratches. First introduced in Photoshop CS2, the Spot Healing Brush may not be the only image retouching tool you'll ever need, but its speed and performance make it perfect for cleaning up small problems before moving on to the larger, more time consuming ones.

Ironically, the Spot Healing Brush's biggest strength, that it does almost everything on its own with little effort or input from us, has also been its biggest weakness. The way it has worked from CS2 until now is that you'd simply click on a small area of damaged or unwanted texture, then watch as Photoshop magically replaced it with randomly-selected good texture from somewhere close to the spot you clicked. As long as the problem area was small enough and there was enough good image data close by, the Spot Healing Brush was usually able to give us acceptable results. But when there wasn't enough good image data or the problem spot was too big and complex for it to decide on its own how to repair the area, it ran into problems and there was nothing we could do other than switch to a different tool like the standard Healing Brush, the Patch Tool or the Clone Stamp Tool, all of which require more time and effort.

In Photoshop CS5, the general idea hasn't changed. We still just click on a problem spot and let the Spot Healing Brush do the rest with no real ability on our part to control the results. But this time, Adobe has given the tool a major boost in intelligence and greatly increased its chances for success with the brand new Content-Aware Healing feature, which now let's Photoshop make much better decisions on how to remove and repair texture based on the actual content of your image! How does this compare with the "old" way of how the Spot Healing Brush worked? Let's find out!

Since this is just a first look at one of the new features in Photoshop CS5, we won't be covering the Spot Healing Brush in great detail here. For that, be sure to check out our full Spot Healing Brush tutorial.

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Here's a photo I snapped one day of some numbers spray painted on a sidewalk near a construction site:

Normally, removing the paint from the sidewalk (in the photo, at least) would be a simple yet somewhat time consuming task for the Clone Stamp Tool, but just for fun, let's see how well we can clean it up using the upgraded Spot Healing Brush in Photoshop CS5. First, I'll add a new blank layer above the Background layer by clicking on the New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers panel. When the new layer appears, I'll double-click on its default name of "Layer 1" and change it to spot healing, pressing Enter (Win) / Return (Mac) when I'm done to accept the new name. This way, I can do all of my spot healing work on the new layer and avoid touching the original image:

With the new layer added, I'll select the Spot Healing Brush from the Tools panel. It's still found nested in with the other healing tools in Photoshop CS5 (the standard Healing Brush, Patch Tool and the Red Eye Tool), so if it wasn't showing in the Tools panel, I could simply click and hold on whichever of the other tools was showing in its place and select the Spot Healing Brush from the fly-out menu. Nothing new here so far:

The New Content-Aware Option

With the Spot Healing Brush selected, if we look up in the Options Bar, we see the same Proximity Match and Create Texture options that have always been there, but in Photoshop CS5, we now find a brand new, third option - Content-Aware:

Adobe is so sure you're going to want to use the new Content-Aware option from now on that they've selected it for us by default. Before we look at it, though, let's see how well the Spot Healing Brush does using the old default setting, Proximity Match. I'll select it in the Options Bar:

In fairness, the Spot Healing Brush was never meant to be used on such a large area. As its name implies, it was designed to remove or repair small spots, so I won't try to completely remove all the paint from the sidewalk, but let's try it on a small section. I'll zoom in on the number 0 on the left. Then, with the old Proximity Match option selected in the Options Bar, which sets the Spot Healing Brush to how it worked prior to CS5, I'll paint over the top of the number. The area I paint over is temporarily filled with a translucent black so I can see where I've painted:

With Proximity Match selected, Photoshop simply tries to replace the texture I painted over with good texture from the surrounding area. This is how things worked in CS2, CS3 and CS4, and when I release my mouse button, we see the results:

It's not the complete disaster I was expecting, but I still wouldn't call it good. For one thing, where did the blue come from? I don't remember seeing any blue in the original. Also, it looks like Photoshop randomly grabbed an area of the image between the two sidewalk sections and just threw it in there without a care. Did it replace the texture I painted over with something different? Yes. Did it replace it with something I can actually use? No.

Let's try the same thing, but this time, I'll select the Content-Aware option in the Options Bar. I'll again paint over the same general area:

When I'm done, I'll release my mouse button and let Photoshop CS5 give it a shot. When using the Content-Aware option, Photoshop needs more time to analyze the image and figure out the best way to "heal" it, so expect to wait a few more seconds at least for the results:

This time, things worked out much better! Rather than simply grabbing random texture from around the area I painted, Photoshop was able to examine the actual content of the image and figure out what texture would work best in that location. It's still not perfect, and I'd still want to fix up some problem areas with the Clone Stamp Tool, but Photoshop CS5's new Content-Aware Healing was at least able to give me a much better starting point than what we saw with the old version of the Spot Healing Brush.

Let's try a different image with Content-Aware Healing and see if we get similar results. We'll do that next!

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