Retouching
Remove, heal and clone, and how they differ.
Retouching removes things: the bin in the corner, the blemish on a cheek, the cable across the sky. There are three tools, and picking the right one for the situation matters more than how carefully you paint.
| Tool | What it does | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Remove | Paint over something and Matisse fills the area from its surroundings. | Objects against busy or irregular backgrounds, where there is no clean patch to copy. |
| Heal | Copies from a source area but blends its brightness and colour into the destination. | Blemishes and marks on an even surface like skin or sky, where the tone must match seamlessly. |
| Clone | Copies from a source area exactly, with no blending. | Hard edges and repeating patterns like brickwork, where blending would smear the structure. |
Controlling a repair
- Source — where heal and clone take their pixels from. If a repair looks wrong, moving the source is usually the fix.
- Opacity — how strongly the repair is applied. Reducing it is how you soften a blemish rather than erasing it, which keeps skin looking like skin.
- Feather — how soft the edge of the repair is. More feather hides the boundary on smooth surfaces; less holds a crisp edge.
- Variation — asks for a different attempt at the same repair when the first one does not convince.
Every repair stays a separate, editable item. You can go back and adjust or delete one from an edit you made days ago without disturbing the others, because nothing is flattened into the image.
Getting good results
- Work at 100% zoom. Repairs that look perfect fitted to the screen often fall apart at full size.
- Use several small repairs rather than one big one. Small areas give the fill more usable surrounding detail to work from.
- Watch for repeated texture. Clone in particular can duplicate a recognisable feature, and once you see the pattern you cannot unsee it.