Adobe Photoshop Image Touch Up

Basic image touch-up in Photoshop

With these basic fixes, my image looks pretty good. But if I remove those bushes in the foreground, it will look even better. So let's move out of Camera Raw and use some of the Photoshop touch-up tools.

To edit the image in Photoshop in its current state as a flattened rasterized layer, click Open Image. To edit the image as a Smart Object, hold down the Shift key and click Open Image. Many Photoshop tools work on Smart Objects, but the Healing and Clone tools require a rasterized image. To rasterize a Smart Object, right click or Control-click on the Smart Object Layer and choose Rasterize Layer.

Small touch-ups with the Spot Healing brush

Photoshop provides so many great options for touching up images. Personal preference, along with trial and error, will dictate which tools you use on a given image. The size of the area to be touched up and the objects surrounding the touch-up area will also factor into your success with any given tool.

The Spot Healing brush with Content Aware Fill does an amazing job for most small touch-ups, such as the branch in the lower left corner. (Tip: The Spot Healing brush works best on straight lines. If you have an area to remove that is not comprised of straight line, try using Selection with Edit > Fill: Content-Aware. To get the best result, select as small a selection as possible). I'm going to remove the little one on the left side first, as part of my overall strategy to get rid of the big bush in the middle.

Select the Spot Healing brush and make sure that Content-Aware is selected in the settings at the top of your screen. Adjust the brush size to be slightly wider than what is required to paint over any spots that need to be removed. To resize brushes quickly, use the ] key to increase brush size, and the [ key to decrease brush size.

In this case, I have used a small brush that's slightly wider than the individual branches. With a single stroke over each branch, they disappear, and Photoshop does a great job of automatically filling the area left behind (see Figure 6).

Figure 6. The Spot Healing brush removes the portions of the image you select.

The original image now has the small branch on the left and a few other small artifacts at the bottom removed.