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Learn how to remove acne and other minor skin blemishes from a portrait, leaving healthy looking skin in its place, using the Spot Healing Brush in Photoshop! The Spot Healing Brush can remove or repair all kinds of small imperfections in a photo, but here we'll focus on how to use it to retouch skin.

• In this iPhone Photo Recovery Software review, we list the top 5 best iPhone photo recovery applications for you and introduces their features, pros & cons respectively, as well as a detailed comparison form to provide you valuable references.
• Heal blemishes, imperfections and acne, adjust skin tones and colors or crop, flip and rotate to make the perfect photo. Snapheal’s advanced and unique healing algorithm allows you to remove multiple objects at the same time.
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• Among them, is the clone tool, which copies pixels; the healing brush, used to correct tone and color; and the dodge and burn tool, which can lighten (dodge) and darken (burn) pixels. However, according to many users, this Mac photo editing software falls short in ease of use.

Why The Spot Healing Brush Is Perfect For Removing Blemishes

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Photoshop's Spot Healing Brush is basically a texture replacement tool. It takes damaged or unwanted texture from one area and replaces it with good texture from the surrounding area. The good texture is then blended with the problem area's original tone and color to 'heal' the image with seamless results.

The Spot Healing Brush is similar to its big brother, the standard Healing Brush. But while the Healing Brush makes us choose the good texture ourselves, the Spot Healing Brush chooses texture all on its own, and that makes it much faster to use. When retouching skin, we just click on a blemish with the Spot Healing Brush, and like magic, the blemish is gone! Let's see how it works. I'll be using Photoshop CC but this tutorial is fully compatible with Photoshop CS6.

To follow along, you can use any image where the person's skin could use some quick retouching. I'll use this photo so we can see how the Spot Healing Brush can be used to quickly remove some distracting pimples from the young woman's face (acne photo from Shutterstock):

Here's what the same photo will look like after retouching her skin:

This tutorial is part of our Portrait Retouching collection. Let's get started!

How To Remove Skin Blemishes In Photoshop

Step 1: Add A New Blank Layer

With the photo newly-opened in Photoshop, the Layers panel shows the image on the Background layer:

To keep your retouching work separate from the original image, add a new layer above the image by pressing and holding the Alt (Win) / Option (Mac) key on your keyboard and clicking the Add New Layer icon:

In the New Layer dialog box, name the layer 'Spot Healing' and then click OK:

The new 'Spot Healing' layer appears above the Background layer:

Step 2: Select The Spot Healing Brush

Select the Spot Healing Brush from the Toolbar:

Step 3: Select The 'Sample All Layers' Option

With the Spot Healing Brush selected, turn on the Sample All Layers option in the Options Bar. This lets the Spot Healing Brush sample texture not just from the currently-selected layer (the 'Spot Healing' layer, which is blank), but also from the image below:

Step 4: Select 'Content-Aware'

Still in the Options Bar, make sure Type is set to Content-Aware. This allows Photoshop to make more intelligent decisions when choosing good replacement texture:

Step 5: Click On The Skin Blemishes To Heal Them

Click on pimples and other minor skin blemishes with the Spot Healing Brush to quickly heal them. For best results, keep your brush slightly larger than the blemish. To change your brush size from the keyboard, press the left bracket key ( [ ) to make the brush smaller or the right bracket key ( ] ) to make it larger.

Here, I'm positioning my brush over one of the pimples, and I've resized my brush so that the cursor (the black circular outline) is just a bit larger than the pimple itself:

I'll click on the pimple with the Spot Healing Brush, and instantly, it's gone! Photoshop replaced it with good skin texture from the surrounding area:

How To Fix Mistakes

If Photoshop makes a mistake and the blemish isn't gone after the first try, undo your click by pressing Ctrl+Z (Win) / Command+Z (Mac) on your keyboard. Resize your brush if needed, and then click on the same spot to try again. Each time you click, you'll get a different result.

I'll continue clearing up other pimples in the area by moving my brush over them, adjusting its size with the left and right bracket keys, and clicking. Her skin is already looking better:

Retouching Larger Areas With The Spot Healing Brush

Let's move down to her chin where we see some larger problems:

To clear up more difficult areas like this, tackle the easier problems first. I'll start by clicking on the small, isolated pimples with the Spot Healing Brush to heal them and get them out of the way:

Then, rather than trying to fix a large area all at once with a super wide brush and a single click, approach it in smaller sections, beginning from the outside and making your way inward. Along with clicking, you can also click and drag the Spot Healing Brush in short strokes. As you drag, your brush stroke will appear black:

Release your mouse button and Photoshop heals the area with surrounding texture:

I'll continue clicking and dragging over the area one small section at a time, going back over any problem spots as needed with additional clicks. After a short few minutes worth of effort, the Spot Healing Brush did a pretty good job:

I'll do the same thing for the area on the other side of her chin, using a small brush and a series of clicks and short brush strokes to tackle the area a little at a time. And here's the result:

Clearing Up The Remaining Blemishes

There's one cluster of pimples remaining, and it's directly under her nose:

Once again, I'll start by clicking on the smaller, isolated pimples to heal them, keeping my brush just slightly larger than the pimple itself:

Then I'll use a combination of clicking and dragging with a small brush to heal the remaining area:

The area is now pimple-free, with healthy skin texture in its place:

The Spot Healing Brush Blend Modes

When retouching skin with the Spot Healing Brush, you’ll often get better results by changing the blend mode of the brush from Normal (the default setting) to Lighten. The Blend Mode option is found in the Options Bar:

With the blend mode set to Lighten, Photoshop will only replace pixels that are darker than the good texture. Since pimples and other skin blemishes are usually darker than normal skin tone, only the pimple or blemish itself gets replaced, leaving more of the original skin texture surrounding it intact. If a blemish is lighter than the normal skin tone, try the Darken mode instead.

To quickly switch between blend modes for the Spot Healing Brush, press and hold the Shift key on your keyboard and press the + or - keys.

Before And After Comparison

To compare your retouching work with the original image, toggle the 'Spot Healing' layer on and off by clicking its visibility icon in the Layers panel:

Click it once to turn the 'Spot Healing' layer off and view the original, unedited version:

Click it again to turn the 'Spot Healing' layer back on and view your image with the skin blemishes removed:

And there we have it! That's how to remove acne and other minor skin blemishes with the Spot Healing Brush in Photoshop! Now that you know how the Spot Healing Brush works, take your skills to the next level by learning how to smooth skin in a portrait, or how to reduce the appearance of wrinkles! You'll find even more tutorials in our Photo Retouching section!

So, you just found that you had deleted or lost some files? Maybe on your computer hard drive or an external storage device.

And you also learned that there are data recovery software might be able to recover the files.

There’s more than meets the eye, though. Some of the data recovery programs are good, some are not. Some claim to be free — but when you try to use them, you find out you have to purchase a license to fully recover or save your files.

Seriously, I hate the trick! Yes, I call it a “trick”.

How do you tell good, solid data recovery software from wallet-sucking fraudulent programs?

Here’s your answer: I’ve personally downloaded, tested 50+ data recovery programs on my Windows 10 based PC and macOS based MacBook Pro, sorted out the truly free data recovery tools and put them all in one place.

The apps listed below are 100% free, or open source, or freeware, which means there’s no catch and you can use them to scan, recover and save your files without any restrictions. No need to purchase a license!

Before you read the list though, check out these practical data recovery tips to increase your chances of recovering the data. Saving additional data to the disk drive in question could overwrite your deleted data, making it difficult to restore your lost information.

• Stop using the computer or device (or SD card, flash drive, etc.) where your lost files located.
• Try not to install a data recovery program on the same drive you want to recover files from.
• Once you are ready to export the recovered files, save them on a different volume.

Update Note (July 2018):

Hey, it’s been a while since I check this roundup post again. Sadly, a few programs in this list are no longer free. Some got acquired, some don’t work anymore due to lack of updates. For the accuracy of this post, I have to remove some programs from this list. Previously there were 20 truly free data recovery programs got featured, now much fewer.

This is unfortunate, but understandable if you stand from the developer’s point of view. These days it’s really hard for software developers to keep updating a piece of free software (especially Mac apps) to make it still work with the latest operating system.

Also, some free data recovery software are pushing users to buy their Pro versions. A good example is Recuva. I just tested the last version of Recuva on a Windows-10 based PC, and I instantly felt the maker is promoting Recuva Professional more aggressively than before though the free version should be enough to handle your data recovery needs. By the way, in case you don’t know. The maker of Recuva and CCleaner, Piriform, got acquired by Avast in 2017. Now you get the point 🙂 But Recuva is still free to use if you can spot out the catch (and I’ll point it out below).

Anyway, thanks for your attention and I appreciate your feedback on this article. Quite a few readers emailed me personally, thank you for taking the time. And if you get to know a new free data recovery tool, leave a comment or send me an email.

P.S. Okay, I get your feedback that sometimes free data recovery software just don’t work that well. If you are willing to try a paid data recovery program, I recommend Stellar Data Recovery – they have both Windows and macOS versions and support recovering data from mobile devices like iPhones and Android phones as well. Free trails are available but won’t allow you to save your files (if found after the scan). Your success rate may vary.

Also read our in-depth reviews:

1. Recuva (Windows)

If you want to get back the files you accidentally deleted from Windows Recycle Bin or USB stick, then Recuva is absolutely the first program you should try. A couple of years ago, I used it to recover most of the photos and videos for a friend in San Francisco who accidentally formatted her camera SD card. Recuva is 100% free for personal use.

You can get Recuva from its official website here. Just scroll down on the page and click the green “Free Download” button, when using the program do not be bothered by the upgrade pitch 🙂

Here’s a video tutorial you may find useful:

What I like:

• Quick to download and install. The portable version runs from flash drive.
• Easy to use. Perfect for everyone as it comes with both simple and advanced options.
• Deep Scan function could find more files though take a bit longer.
• Able to preview highlighted images before recovery.

What I Dislike:

• Many junk files are scanned and listed there. Some of those show as unrecoverable, making it a bit hard to find the files you actually want.

2. PhotoRec (Windows/Mac/Linux)

Created by Christophe Grenier, PhotoRec is a free, open source file recovery program that works amazingly well on almost every operating system. PhotoRec isn’t just a photo recovery tool (don’t be fooled by its name). You can use this powerful software to recover nearly 500 different file formats from hard disks or removable media. Here’s a tutorial on how to use PhotoRec step by step.

What I Like:

• Works on multiple platforms (Windows, macOS, and Linux).
• Updated by its developer regularly.
• Powerful recovery capability that includes a large variety of file formats.
• It’s open source (source code is released).

What I Dislike:

• Not very user-friendly, as it uses a command line tool interface.
• You may want to get some help from a techie friend to get this working properly.

3. Puran File Recovery (Windows)

Another powerful, yet free data recovery utility. Puran File Recovery works great to rescue data from practically any storage medium. The software supports ten different languages. All Puran utilities are totally free for private and non-commercial use. You can see a video tutorial from YouTube here.

What I Like:

• Deep Scan and Full Scan options for more powerful searching.
• Able to preview files once highlighted.
• You can categorize found items by file types. e.g. pictures, videos, documents, etc.
• File quality reserves after recovery.

What I Dislike:

• Not that intuitive for new users, especially when compared to some of the other options on this list.

4. Glary Undelete (Windows)

A great undelete tool similar to Recuva, Glary Undelete “unerases” items from FAT and NTFS disks. It’s simple to use: just choose a drive to scan, click “Search”, and wait for a while, depending on the volume of the disk selected. You’ll see a bunch of files found. Once you do, just navigate to the folders on the left, use the preview function to locate your targeted items, and you’re good to go! Check out more from this video tutorial (from Vimeo).

What I Like:

• Quick to download and install. Clean, logical software interface.
• Perfect for undeleting items from the Recycle Bin or an external storage device.
• Preview capability helps find files you want to retrieve.

What I Dislike:

• Many junk files are found and listed, which can feel a bit overwhelming.
• Less capable of recovering data lost to formatting or a hard disk crash.

5. SoftPerfect File Recovery (Windows)

This is another nice tool to bring your accidentally deleted files back to life. SoftPerfect File Recovery(scroll down on the page to download the program, skip the EaseUS recommendation) was primarily developed to help you rescue data that was accidentally deleted from hard disks, USB flash drives, SD and CF cards, etc. It supports popular file systems such as FAT12/16/32, NTFS, and NTFS5 with compression and encryption. The program runs under Windows XP through Windows 10.

What I Like:

• Portable, no installation required.
• 33 interface languages are available.
• Very easy to use – no unnecessary settings and screens.
• Able to restore files with “path”.

What I Dislike:

• No file preview. Scanned files are listed one-by-one without being categorized in folders.

6. Exif Untrasher (macOS)

Exif Untrasher is another totally free program that runs on Mac (macOS 10.6 or above). It’s primarily designed to recover JPEG photos that have been deleted from a digital camera. It also works if you want to get back lost JPEGs from an external drive, USB stick, SD card, etc., as long as it’s a removable disk you can mount on your Mac.

What I Like:

• Easy to download and install.
• Quick and accurate in findingrecovering erased pictures from my camera SD card.
• Quality of recovered photos is very good.

What I Dislike:

• Works only with JPEG files.
• Can’t recover photos removed from an internal Mac hard drive (you’ll notice the “Macintosh HD” option is greyed when you attempt to select the volume).

7. Tokiwa Data Recovery (Windows)

If you want to recover your lost files quickly, Tokiwa Data Recovery is a nice option. It’s a standalone application, which means little time is required for the installation process. In my case, Tokiwa found 42,709 files in less than a minute — very efficient! Tokiwa claims it can retrieve and wipe documents, archives, pictures, videos, and more from common storage media.

What I Like:

• It’s portable — no installation required.
• Fast scanning process.
• Deep scan function available after simple scan is over.
• Capable of wiping files permanently.

What I Dislike:

• I couldn’t find any settings or documentation — though it’s simple to use.
• Can’t preview images or files.
• Wipe function doesn’t allow erased items to be saved in the system drive.

8. PC INSPECTOR File Recovery (Windows)

Another super-powerful freeware, PC Inspector File Recovery helps recover deleted, formatted files from disks or partitions, even if the boot sector has been erased or damaged. The program won’t help if you have mechanical problems with your disk drive, however, and it can’t be installed on the same drive you’d like to recover files from. A video tutorial is available on YouTube here.

What I Like:

• Powerful, able to detect logical drives that other freeware can’t.
• Easier to organize recovered files, as it automatically puts them into correct file structures.
• Supports many languages, as seen in the above screenshot.
• Claims it’s freeware for good.

What I Dislike:

• Icons and instructions look a bit obsolete.
• Freezes sometimes during the recovery process.

9. Wise Data Recovery (Windows)

Another excellent freeware from the WiseClean family. Wise Data Recovery helps you recover files and folders from various devices. The software is intuitive: select the drive you want to scan, wait, then can browse the item tree to recover your precious files.

What I Like:

• Simple to set up and use.
• Speedy scanning process.
• Multiple languages available.

What I Dislike:

• No deep scan capability.
• Large percentage of files are unrecoverable.

10. UndeleteMyFiles Pro (Windows)

Don’t be fooled by the software name. While it sounds like a pro edition that requires a purchase to use, UndeleteMyFiles Pro is absolutely free, and comes with tools for data recovery and file wipe as well. Just select the drive, scan it, and you should be able to view a list of missing files. SeriousBit, the developers, says UndeleteMyFiles Pro works well for recovering deleted files from hard disks, USB, SD/CF cards, and other storage media.

What I Like:

• Quick, easy and intuitive to use.
• File preview ability for certain types of files.

What I Dislike:

• File names are missing in scanned results.
• No deep scan capability.

11. TestDisk (Windows/Mac/Linux)

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TestDisk, PhotoRec’s sister program, is an extremely powerful partition recovery tool developed to help find deleted/lost partitions, make crashed disks bootable again, and a whole lot more. TestDisk is like an experienced doctor that cures most of the problems related to computer hard disks. A video tutorial about how to use TestDisk is here.

What I Like:

• Free, open source, secure.
• Can fix partition tables and recover deleted partitions.
• Rescues data from problematic partitions caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses, or human error.

What I Dislike:

• Non-GUI program — i.e. it’s not for computer newbies as it requires more tech knowledge to use successfully.

12. Undelete360 (Windows)

Like the name says,Undelete360undeletes files you accidentally removed from your computer, Recycle Bin, flash drive, digital camera, memory card, etc. You’ll see two tabs when the program is launched: “Recover Files” and “Wipe Files“. To get back your deleted items, stay on the “Recover Files” tab, highlight the disk drive, and start searching.

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What I Like:

• Multiple languages available.
• The file tree is very helpful to find targeted items.
• File path, as well as the condition of the files, are indicated.
• Includes a wipe tool that securely deletes files that are beyond recovery.

What I Dislike:

• My computer hung during the scanning process.
• Quite time-consuming compared to most of the other apps listed here.

13. FreeUndelete (Windows)

As the name indicates,FreeUndeleteis freeware tool that undeletes files from any NTFS- and FAT-based volume. FreeUndelete runs on Windows 10, 8, 7, Vista, and XP. During my test, I found the program intuitive, and the process of data scanning is pretty fast. However, what frustrated me was that the found files and folders are not well-organized, making it hard to actually select and recover those you want to recover.

What I Like:

• Quick to download, install, and scan.
• Very intuitive – no complicated buttons or options.

What I Dislike:

• The panel on the left is kind of odd — there is no drive D: or E: on my computer.
• Found files are poorly organized. I couldn’t find the pictures I wanted to recover, whether they were recovered or not.

14. Lazesoft Recovery Suite Home (Windows)

If you are looking for an ultimately powerful windows rescue solution, then Lazesoft Recovery Suiteis the one. Besides recovering data from common disks, Lazesoft also comes with a set of utilities that rescues your Windows system when you forget your login password, or even won’t boot.

Note: the software has several editions, but only the Home Edition is free.

What I Like:

• Multiple modes (Undelete, Unformat, Deep Scan) available to choose.
• Able to preview pictures before they are retrieved.
• Many super-useful utilities are included, including password recovery, Windows rescue, disk clone, and more.

What I Dislike:

• Download is a bit slow.

15. WinHex (Windows)

WinHexis targeted more toward forensics data recovery needs. After you download the archive, unzip it and click on “WinHex.exe” to run the program. It might be a little overwhelming the first time you open it. To scan and recover data, move to “Tools” -> “Disk Tools” -> “File Recovery by Type”. TechTarget also has a detailed tutorial here.

What I Like:

• The only freeware I found for investigation and forensics usage.
• Able to edit/clone disk and recover partitions as well.

What I Dislike:

• Needs certain expertise to handle the program.

Which Free Recovery Software Is The Best?

So, what do you think of this list? Have you tried some of them? Did it work to retrieve your lost files?

I’d like to know your stories. For me, I really like Recuva for Windows and Exit Untrasher for Mac because they helped me pull back some of my deleted items.

Also, if you found another free data recovery software that I missed, please leave the comment below and let me know. I’d be happy to test it out and may feature it here as well.

Heal Tool Photoshop

Don’t forget to backup your computer and hard drive! I just did so with my MacBook, see my recent post: how to backup Mac to an external drive.

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Either way, thanks for reading, and I wish you best of luck getting back the lost data.