Hi Gang, Just been playing around with Photoshop 7.0 and i cant seem to find any way of using the Healing brush or Patch tool on a blank layer, like you can with the Rubber stamp tool. Has anyone found a way of doing this? Would seem to limit the usefulness of these to otherwise very handy tools.

Ta Wideyed

wideyed,

Because of how the healing brush and patch tool work, they must be used on the actual layer. The recommendation is to work on a duplicate layer. HTH.

Greetings, Wideyed! Welcome to RetouchPRO.

If you haven't seen this tutorial (http://www.digitalretouch.org/download/healing/healing.pdf) by Katrin Eismann, it's one of the better ones I've seen on this new PS7 feature.

Cheers...
~DannyR~

i think the reason the healing brush/patch tool will not work on a blank layer is because of the process the actual tool is going through.

its not just cloning an area. thats what the rubber stamp tool is for. the healing brush is actually taking pixels and averaging them out. between one area and another.. so if there is a blank layer, there are no pixels for the healing brush to average into the source area which you want to heal from...

make any sense?

As noted, the healing tools require destination pixels - thus you can't heal to transparency. Healing looks at an image as both smooth and noise components and handles the math differently for both when it heals/combines between the source and destination pixels.

There are two work methods which make users feel more comfortable with this new tool behaviour - since they are used to the flexibility of clone stamping to transparency:

i) Simply dupe the main file or the background layer and heal on the entire dupe - accepting the larger file in the SHORT TERM...

ii) Select and float larger areas to new layers so that there is enough data to use as the heal source and the destination, again this is only temporary and in the short term.

Once you have finished healing - you can run my Photoshop 7 action 'IsolateHealing.atn' or just create your own 'difference mask' to reveal the healing and to remove the unchanged pixels - at the end of the day you can have the same effect as the clone stamp tool.

This action link exists at my website:

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/IsolateHealing.zip

While an article on masking has more info on difference masking, among some other quick and simple masking methods:

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/ST_utilitymasks.html

And it also lives at the RetouchPro actions/brushes/styles etc section.

The healing tools are only new - with some time there will be many tricks and techniques to take advantage of these tools (and others such as AlienSkin ImageDoctor etc).

Regards,

Stephen Marsh.