Retouch Tool in Adobe Camera Raw
By Brian Auer • May 21st, 2008
As promised in the Spot Healing Brush Tutorial, we’re now taking a look at the Retouch Tool in ACR (and Lightroom?). This tool is a little more “hands on”, so I figured the best way to show it would be with a screen capture. I’ll outline a couple things here in the text, but the bulk of the information is in the video embedded at the end of the article.
HOW TO ACCESS THE RETOUCH TOOL
It’s only accessible from within the Adobe Camera Raw interface — so don’t start looking in for it in Photoshop. There’s a little icon along the top menu that looks like the image shown above. You can click on it to bring up a sub-menu, or you can access it by pressing “B”.
HOW TO USE THE RETOUCH TOOL
The retouch tool is used in a very similar fashion to a clone stamp or a spot healing brush. In general, you click on the spot and you’ll see a set of rings appear (one red and one green). The red ring is the target and the green ring is the source. They can be moved and resized with the mouse. The sampling mode can also be switched between “heal” and “clone”.
WHEN THE RETOUCH TOOL FAILS
Like with the Spot Healing Brush, hard edges can present a difficult fix, but this tool allows you to move the source sampling spot to a location of your choice. Hard edges are easier to deal with, but you may still run into difficult situations when very complex geometries are involved.
Brian Auer is a photography enthusiast from North Idaho. He's also the guy behind the Epic Edits Weblog. As a hobbyist photographer since 2003, his passion has been to constantly improve his photography skill set, to share his own knowledge with others, and to become an integral part of the photographic community.
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Nice video, Brian!
It’s very much the same in Lightroom, too.
Good to know — I had a feeling the 2 softwares probably used the same retouch tool.
in fact lightroom and acr are identical raw converters.
the only difference is the ui
Nicely done Brian. I will add the added value in Lightroom is that you can carry over all retouches from one photo to another. This is a huge time saver as you can do all your retouching on one photo and then make minor adjustments to the others if there is variation in placement of your subject. This is perfect when spotting images from a common photo session.
@ Jim Goldstein: this is possible in Bridge/ACR too as far as I know…
Very helpful. I’m a video tutorial junky…keep ‘em coming! Thanks.
Hmm. Very useful.
Goog Luck
Brian, you may add this tutorial to sharing “Tutorial for Photo”
Cool videos there, thanks for the heads up! I had been using this software just recently and I will researching on this part on how to use the retouch tool and I found your blog, nice work! Keep them coming!
Hi, great site! Really cool info you have here.
I also made a blog that tells you which photo editor options/settings to use in order to enhance your photos and keep them looking natural. The specific settings (values) are listed so everything should be clear.
This is for free photo editors like Picnik or Pixlr or others that I also list – you don’t need to install it or register to use it.
You can see my blog in:
http://www.enhance-photos.blogspot.com/
If you’re interested feel free to also try to enhance your photos and please let me know how that worked for you – you can leave comments in my blog. It did a good job for most of my photos (not all) so I wonder how it will work for other people’s photos.
Thanks!