Remove straggling hairs hanging in face

[Allyson Kesler]

It's a long strand down the side of the face,but not in the eyes. Maybe I don't know how to use the healing brush the right way because it doesn't seem to do anything. I do know how to clone, but feel it might be too harsh.

[dave milbut]

that doesn't sound too bad.

Start with the clone and use it with a soft brush and low opacity 20-30%, build up slowly.

once you get it close, try the patch tool. a good method is set it for destination. select the area to patch and drag to a clean area. then BEFORE you do anything else hit Crtl-shift-F (fade) and lower the opacity of the patch a bit.

if you want to use the healing brush, make sure your source and destination are on the same layer and make sure the brush is set to Normal mode in the option bar.

[Daryl Pritchard]

Not knowing what color the hair is, another tip regarding the healing brush is to keep in mind that the cloned data is blended to the destination area using the texture and brightness of the destination...I believe that's a correct way to put it. If you are cloning lighter skin color over where a dark strand of hair was, then the healing brush will not be of much use since the dark colors will dominate. What I usually find works pretty well for me is to first use the clone tool to clone, in this case, some skin areas over the hair. Then, I use the healing brush to help blend out any harsh lines or repetitive textures the clone tool might've created. That is, with the lighter skin areas first cloned over the hair, the healing brush can then be used more successfully to clone and blend more skin areas over the previously cloned areas. I'm sure there is a better way to do this but I've been pretty successful with this approach.

Regards,

Daryl

[dave milbut]

also isolating the area to be "healed" with a selection can sometimes help with bleed-in from darker areas around the healing brush destination.

[YrbkMgr]

Good advice here, to be sure...

When I use the healing brush, I find a hard brush without it being aligned gives the best results, more often than not.

[Lundberg02]

I forgot to say that you should do your cloning at a zoom that is jsut showing the pixels