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Scott Kel

The Adobe Photoshop CS3 Book for Digital Photographers

Adobe Photoshop CS3 Classroom in a Book

The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book for Digital Photographers

PhotoShop CS3 Essential Skills

Patch up your most prized photos.

Photoshop’s Patch tool makes it quick and easy to patch up problems in your digital photos and scans, from stains to blemishes to dust spots. Use this guide to learn:

How the Patch tool works and when you should use it
The Patch tool’s advantages over other Photoshop retouching tools
Step-by-step guidelines on how to use the Patch tool to retouch photos

An Introduction to the Patch Tool

The Patch tool is one of the quickest and most effective ways to retouch images in Photoshop. Retouching is the process of altering a photo or an image, usually to remove imperfections, such as spots, stains, and other flaws.

The Main Uses of the Patch Tool

The Patch tool is typically used for three main retouching tasks:

Retouching portraits of people: The Patch tool makes it easy to remove wrinkles, freckles, blemishes, dark circles under the eyes, shiny skin, and other imperfections that commonly show up in portraits of people.
Repairing old photos: Over time, printed photos degrade: they can develop cracks, spots, fading, and discoloration. The process of scanning and digitizing old photos or negatives introduces even more flaws—as the scanner scans the photo, it also typically captures dust, hair, and other particles on the scanner bed itself. The Patch tool helps you resolve all of these problems with only a few clicks.
Removing unwanted elements: The Patch tool is the most effective Photoshop tool for removing large, unwanted elements from scanned photos and negatives, such as a professional photographer’s “signature” (often printed along the side of studio shots) or an imprinted date in the right corner (common in photos taken with film cameras from the 1980s and 1990s). The Patch tool also works wonders on spots in digital photos that result from dust particles on lenses or digital SLR sensors.

How the Patch Tool Works

The Patch tool lets you replace the pixels in a problematic area of an image with pixels from another, “clean” part of the same image. For instance, if you’re working with an image of a sunset that has a group of dust spots in the sky, you can select the dust spots and then replace that area of the image with a part of the sky nearby that’s dust-free. Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how the Patch tool works:

With the Patch tool active, you select the flawed area that you’d like to fix.
Once you complete your selection, a boundary of “marching ants” (a moving dotted line) appears around it.
You click on the selected area and, still holding down the mouse button, move the mouse to a clean part of the image. A duplicate of the original selection’s boundary replaces the cursor as you move the mouse.
The original selection stays highlighted and changes as you move around the image—the pixels in the duplicate selection replace those in the original selection on the fly.
When you come upon an area with pixels that you’d like to use to replace those in the original selection, you release the mouse button.
Photoshop then automatically merges the overall traits of the original, flawed area, such as lighting, texture, and shading, with the new pixels you’re using to fix that area. The result is a seamless patch that eliminates the original imperfections.

You can also set the tool to work in the opposite way—you select a clean part of the image to use to fix another part of the image and then apply those “clean” pixels to the problematic area (see How to Switch the Patch Tool’s Source and Destination Pixels).

Patterns and the Patch Tool

In addition to replacing one part of an image with pixels from another part of that image, you can also use the Patch tool to replace a problematic part of an image with a pattern from Photoshop’s built-in pattern library, or with a pattern that you design. This feature comes in handy when you’d just like to apply a certain pattern to your selection, such as a canvas or tiled texture, rather than applying “clean” pixels to that selection.

Advantages of the Patch Tool

Several other Photoshop tools besides the Patch tool, such as the Healing Brush tool and the Clone Stamp tool, can be used for routine retouching tasks. But the Patch tool has unique features that make it particularly good for:

Repairing large areas: The Patch tool is the only retouching tool that lets you define and select the entire area that you’d like to repair. This makes it easy to fix problems throughout a large portion of an image with just a few clicks. Making similar repairs with other retouching tools can require many more steps.
Previewing your fixes: The Patch tool is the only retouching tool that lets you preview the results of your retouching before you actually change the problematic area. For instance, if you’re trying to replace a blemish on a person’s nose with clear skin, with the Patch tool you can see ahead of time whether the “new” skin will actually blend well within the context of the other skin on the person’s nose. With other tools, you’ll often have to undo and redo steps in order to get just the right result, which can be tedious and time-consuming.

How to Access the Patch Tool

The Patch tool is located in Photoshop’s Tools palette in the same button that houses the Spot Healing Brush tool, the Healing Brush tool, and the Red Eye tool. To access the Patch tool:

Click on the Spot Healing Brush tool icon in the Tools palette and move your cursor to the right.
A submenu will appear to the right in which you can select the Patch tool. (Alternatively, you can press Shift+J repeatedly to cycle through the four tools in the Tools palette button in which the Patch tool is located until you land on the Patch tool.)