Page 54 - Photoshop User March 2017

KRISTINASHERK >Retouching Magic
RE-MASTERING THE HEALING BRUSH TOOLS IN PHOTOSHOP: DE-MYSTIFYING THE DIFFUSION SLIDER
I’ll start right off and warn you, this is not a “sexy” subject, but if you’ve ever retouched a face in Adobe Photoshop, you need to learn about this topic. It will tremendously alleviate lots of retouching frustrations, and anything I can do to help you not be discouraged when it comes to using Photoshop is considered a “win” in my book.
Portrait retouchers, like myself, rely heavily on the Healing Brush, Spot Healing Brush, and Patch tools. Back when Photo­ shop 2015 was released, it came with a new upgrade to these tools, and Adobe boasted about the improvements they made to them. They promoted the fact that they had enhanced the mercury performance of these tools to make them 120 times faster than their older versions. They also included a new effect that would show you the real­time results of what the heal/patch would look like if you were to release your mouse or pen at that exact moment.
While Adobe did take the time to try and describe this enhancement on their website, unless you’re an engineer,
DIFFUSION SLIDER HISTORY
Before we move on, a little history: While the effect was cool, it totally changed the end product and the way the tools removed the spots that users were trying to eliminate. Portrait and beauty retouchers all over the world started complaining because they couldn’t use the tools anymore for their retouching work—they gave a smudgy appearance to all the areas that had been healed! Retouchers went as far as to revert to using the previous version of Photoshop to temporarily fix this problem!
So what did Adobe do about it? The response may make you cock your head to the side a little. Adobe suggested the user create a text (.txt) file and save it within Photoshop’s pref­ erences folders. You would choose which “legacy” version of the healing brush you’d like to go back to, and depending on which one it was, you’d type a 0, 1, or 2 in the text file. I’m sorry, Adobe, but most of your users would sooner be struck by lightning, then go through this trouble to try to “patch” this problem in this way. (See what I did there?) Thankfully, this nonsense didn’t last too long. With the Adobe Photoshop CC 2015.1 release came the advent of the Diffusion slider. If I had to boil down the definition of what this slider setting does to its most direct meaning, it means: how much Photo­ shop looks at the surrounding area when removing a blemish.
In my experience, the higher the Diffusion slider setting, the less Photoshop cares about matching the healed area to the surrounding pixels in your image. This may be because lower slider values are meant for images with noise, grain, and fine details, while high values are better for smoother areas of images, like skies and walls. Since I’m a portrait retoucher, I deal with faces. I think the reason I’m a little bit partial to the lower slider values is because Photoshop regards pore struc­ ture as “fine detail/texture.”
I wouldn’t necessarily recommend reading it. Here’s excerpt about the new tools’ enhancement:
“The new healing algorithm is better in diffusing the color and spreading them over an area. However, you need to be very clear about the area being sampled or filled. For soft selection, Photoshop thresholds the soft selection at 128 to display an 8­bit mask. As a result, the screen feedback in patch tool can misrepresent what [the] user is actually sampling or trying to heal. This can manifest itself in bright or dark color contamination at the boundary of the filled area, which will be spread over the filled area.
The new algorithm is enhanced to deal with very soft brushes. To limit the contamination, you may want to try different diffusion slider values and be careful with the sampling region.”
an
I don’t know about you, but that might as well be written in Greek! I think probably only about 5% of Photoshop users can truly follow this and understand it. So, in this article, I’m hoping to shed light on this feature using language that everyone can understand.
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