Fixing The Sky With The Patch Tool In Photoshop

On this short video tutorial by Lynda, Adobe expert Chris Orwig shows how to use the patch tool for fixing a problem in the sky.

The patch tool is a very useful tool in Photoshop. You can try and use it using the basic settings of Photoshop but as this video shows, it doesn’t always do the best job “out of the box”. So what can you do to improve the results?

The first thing that you need to know is that the patch tool has options called adaptation (which you can find in the cog wheel on the top bar of Photoshop. The two options that you have are structure and color. On the sky image on this tutorial you can see that the patch tool didn’t do a very good job on the blue sky with the color set to 0. Changing the color value to 2 (for this case) worked much better and playing with structure will follow more closely the area around what you patch. Just remember – more is not necessarily better in this case – just play with the number until you reach the optimal values for each specific image.

This is not the first time that we are looking into the patch tool in Photoshop. If you want a more extensive look – check out “How to Use the Patch Tool to Remove Objects from Images in Photoshop” by Aaron Nace.

You can find many more Photoshop video tutorials on LensVid’s Photoshop section.

Iddo Genuth

Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.