From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

872 Healing with Clone Source plus Diffusion

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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872 Healing with Clone Source plus Diffusion

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- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. You know the healing brush, in Photoshop? Not the spot healing brush, but the regular, old school healing brush. You alt-click on a source point, that's an option-click on a Mac, and then you paint to clone the source onto the destination. And then Photoshop preforms some patented wizardry in order to blend it all together. Wizardry such as we muggles may never understand. But you? You do have some powers of your own. For example, you can transform the source data on the fly using a thing called the clone source panel. You also have this thing in the options bar called the diffusion value. Which you can adjust from one to seven. That's the range. The number one to the number seven. In whole number increments, such as two, three, and four, not to mention five and six. I have now said all of them. And yet together, they are quite powerful. Which is why we're going to use clone source plus diffusion to paint this right eyelash on to this left one. See how radically they differ? And yet, now they are the same. Seriously, doesn't that look altogether natural? I'm guessing by the time you're done with this movie, you'll think to yourself, "Wow, life makes so much sense "when you measure it in whole number increments "from one to seven." Whereas once you get to be my age, which happens to be more than seven, not so much. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, so here we are looking at a photograph from the Dreamstime image library. About which you can learn more and get some great deals at dreamstime.com/deke. Now presumably, we want to heal the fake lashes over the real ones non-destructively. In which case, I need to make a new layer by pressing control + shift + n or command + shift + n on a Mac. And I'll just call this layer eyelashes and then click okay. Now I want you to notice the order of the layers here. We have the photograph on a flat background at the bottom of the stack. Then we've got this empty layer called eyelashes. And then we have a vector based shape layer for the Dreamstime URL. All right, I'm going to go ahead and zoom in here. And then I'll drop down to the bandaid or whatever tool is residing below the eyedropper. Click and hold and choose the standard healing brush from the fly out menu. All right, now I'll make my brush considerably bigger by pressing the right bracket key a few times just so we can keep an eye on what we're doing. Now this tool requires you to manually set a source point, so I'll press the alt key or the option key on the Mac, so my cursor turns into a target. And then I'll click right there at the crease that beings the right eyelid. All right now if at this point I were to start painting over the other eye, nothing would happen. And that's because sample is set to current layer and the current layer is empty. We want this to be set to current and below, that way we won't somehow integrate the Dreamstime layer. At which point you can see a preview of that crease inside my cursor. But it's pointed the wrong direction. And so if you're using the most recent version of Photoshop, notice over here on the left hand side of the options bar, we've got this icon that allows you to bring up the clone source panel. Go ahead and click on it. If it's not available for some reason, you could just go to the window menu and choose clone source instead. And basically the clone source panel is like another options bar full of options for the healing brush. And there are quite a few options available to us. Notice I can see the exact coordinate of the source point. And more importantly, I can go ahead and flip my source by clicking on this icon right here. Which reads, flip horizontal. At which point you will see that things have flipped. Now the thing about eyes is that they're not exactly symmetrical. One eye is invariably angled differently from another. Which is why we're going to have to take advantage of this rotate option right here. But in order to see the rotation happen, we need to set an alignment point. Now the problem with this preview inside the cursor is that it's totally opaque. And it's controlled by this option right here. Show overlay. If you turn it off, the overlay's just going to go away. What I want is to keep the overlay but to lower the opacity to let's say 50% so that we can see both the overlay and the original image at the same time. At which point I'm going to zoom in just a little farther here. Actually what the heck, all the way into 100%. So that I can align these two creases just by clicking like so. Now that is not even sort of the effect I want. But I have now established alignment. At which point I'll press control + z or command + z on the Mac to undo that change. And I will turn on the align checkbox up here in the options bar. And from that point on, I will keep that point of alignment. Which means as I move my brush cursor, I can see the eyelashes going along the eyelid. And as you can see, they don't quite align and that's because the left eye is at a different angle than the right eye. And so what we need to do is change this angle value. Now if you were to look at this as some kind of preview telling you which direction the rotation works, then you might think that positive values rotate in a counterclockwise fashion and negative values go clockwise. Actually, this is a reset icon that resets all of the transformation options right here. So what you need to do to figure out what that value really does, is to click inside it and then press shift + up arrow in order to increase the value in whole number increments. At which point you can see that I am definitely going the wrong direction. I am rotating the eye clockwise instead of counterclockwise. And so instead I'll press shift + down arrow this time around, at which point I will eventually see that the two eyes align, at least more or less, at negative three degrees. All right, so at this point, I'll press the enter key. Or the return key on the Mac, to accept that value. And I'll space bar drag the image over just a little more. And I'll go ahead and paint over that eye like so. In order to heal the right eye over the left one. And we get this affect right here. Which is pretty bad, actually, you may notice. Also there's the fact that I neglected to paint in part of the eyelash. But I'm more concerned right now about this bad edge. And that is an option that came along quietly back in the year 2016, diffusion. Which I have currently set to two. Which is a low value. It means that we get very little in the way of blending around the edges of my brushstroke. What we want to do, at least in the case of this image, is crank that value up to its maximum just by scrubbing it like so. And as you can see here, the maximum diffusion value is seven, at which point I'll undo that last brush stroke by pressing control + Z or command + Z on the Mac. And I'll just go ahead and paint over that eye again. And you can see that I get much better blending. It's going to get better still if I paint a few more brushstrokes as I'm doing right here up into the top eyelid. And then down below into the cheek. And because that align checkbox is turned on, every detail is in alignment. All right, so I'll go ahead and switch to the full screen mode by pressing shift + F and I'll press control + 0 or command + 0 on the Mac to center my zoom. And that is how you heal to absolute perfection using a combination of the clone source panel along with diffusion. Oh my goodness, after that cracker jack episode, what could possibly lie ahead? Well tell ya this, it's going to be good. The stuff of legends. Oh boy do I have a technique for you. I mean, well, you know I assume, I haven't like recorded it yet, but don't worry, I will. And that's because my job is to create Deke's Techniques each and every week. And your job, as we've discussed many times, is to keep watching.

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