THE HEALING BRUSH
Adobe has described the Healing Brush as "The Cloning Tool on steroids." Somewhat true. While you can often treat it like a cloning tool, one that doesn't require precision and offers superior results, it comes with its own set of quirks, and capabilities that go beyond cloning. For any skin work, it will be one of your primary tools.

First, let's note the most peculiar quirk of the Healing brush. In theory, it retains the color and lightness of the target area, while replicating the relationship between lights and darks from the sampled area, translating the sampled texture into the target range of value and tone. It also performs a kind of magical blending between target and sample, and at the edge of the strokes, without muting detail. While this blending pretty much eliminates the "clone worms" so prevalent with the cloning tool, it can be both blessing and bane.

In these images, we see what can go wrong with the healing brush.

The pattern of fine hairs needs to be smoothed out. It would seem to be a perfect job for the healing brush, given it's blending capabilities. (A) We sample from a nearby region with texture but no hair (B). But the result (C) demonstrates the blending capability of the healing brush, precisely where we don't want it. Part of the problem is that we've made our target area too close to a much darker region, but the main problem is the brush size. The ability to suck in surrounding pixels is a direct function of the size of the brush.

THE HEALING BRUSH
Adobe has described the Healing Brush as "The Cloning Tool on steroids." Somewhat true. While you can often treat it like a cloning tool, one that doesn't require precision and offers superior results, it comes with its own set of quirks, and capabilities that go beyond cloning. For any skin work, it will be one of your primary tools.

First, let's note the most peculiar quirk of the Healing brush. In theory, it retains the color and lightness of the target area, while replicating the relationship between lights and darks from the sampled area, translating the sampled texture into the target range of value and tone. It also performs a kind of magical blending between target and sample, and at the edge of the strokes, without muting detail. While this blending pretty much eliminates the "clone worms" so prevalent with the cloning tool, it can be both blessing and bane.

In these images, we see what can go wrong with the healing brush.

The pattern of fine hairs needs to be smoothed out. It would seem to be a perfect job for the healing brush, given it's blending capabilities. (A) We sample from a nearby region with texture but no hair (B). But the result (C) demonstrates the blending capability of the healing brush, precisely where we don't want it. Part of the problem is that we've made our target area too close to a much darker region, but the main problem is the brush size. The ability to suck in surrounding pixels is a direct function of the size of the brush.