Remove blemishes in a photo

- Besides the ability to clone, Pixelmator also offers a tool to help you heal blemishes. Let me show you how this tool can work on some small blemishes. I'll choose file, open. And navigate to our working folder. And open up an image. Now, this image needs just a little bit of touch up. I'm going to make a new empty layer, and grab my tool called the repair tool. You'll notice from the top pop up menu under the gear icon, you have some additional choices.

I'm going to tell it to sample all layers, and to use the advanced method. Now, what we can do is paint over small blemishes. Let's go ahead and select that empty layer and paint. And you see that this allows you to take out small blemishes such as shadows or a freckle if you decided that you needed to remove it.

Let's just go ahead and just get this one in the shadow here, and it did a nice job healing that. Here's a small scratch. It's gone. Now, you don't necessarily need to take things out entirely. Sometimes what I'll do is take out those bigger blemishes and fill in the shadows on the eye. Then, once you get that, you can blend it back a bit.

Now, if it's too bad, hit undo and take a smaller stroke. Sometimes being too aggressive, we'll go after too many areas at once. There we go, a little bigger. Not bad. And then we could adjust the opacity of that top copy. What I want to do is mix that back, so that it softens the blemishes but doesn't remove them entirely.

That filled in the eye nicely, and restored the freckles. They're now not not gone, they're just not quite so intense. So, a simple change there filling in some of the shadows on the eyes and an easy way to do that retouching. Let's go ahead and group those together and I'll duplicate the group and merge. Now, blurring that copy is going to give us a very quick fix.

We'll take that, toss on the Gaussian blur. There we go. And simply put that copy in a mode like soft light. And lower the opacity. Now, we have a nice richness to the color. If I needed to brighten things up, I could do a mode like screen mode and simply adjust the opacity to taste and it acts as a very nice soft and gentle fill light.

That looks great now, skin looks believable, we still have the texture, but a gentle lightening that filled in the details and a little bit of light retouching to hide a small blemish.