Delete · Do this to my work · it guesses
Element 74
Remove it, and let the machine mend the hole.
healing brush · magic eraser · content-aware fill
First known
From a history
2005Photoshop CS2's Spot Healing Brush: one-click retouching of dust, scratches and other image flaws. Adobe.
See also: Content-Aware Fill, Photoshop CS5, 2010 (unverified).
April 2005. The page doesn't say sampling is automatic.
Dated by a reputable history or a participant's own account. The source.
- ReadingValue
Specimen № 74 — operate freely
Paint over the power line or the stranger. Then see what it invented.
Fig. 74 — Heal
000 readings · idle
Anatomy of Heal
- 01Mark
- You
- Paints over what shouldn't be there.
- It
- Shows the mark, and changes nothing yet.
- 02Remove
- You
- Lifts the brush.
- It
- Takes out everything under the mark.
- 03Mend
- You
- Watches the hole close.
- It
- Invents the missing pixels, from the edges in.
- 04Reveal
- You
- Asks what was made up.
- It
- Shows its invention, which the picture alone never does.
Phases light as the specimen above registers them. The dark ones are the ones it can't sense.
Lineage
Photoshop's Healing Brush (2002) blended a patch into its surroundings. Content-Aware Fill (2010), built on the PatchMatch algorithm, invented a missing region outright. Phone "magic erasers" (2021) made removal a single stroke.
Under delegation
Mutates
- Survives
- Mutates
- Dissolves
Deleting used to leave a hole you could see. Healing removes the hole as well, by inventing what might have been behind it, and the invention looks exactly like the photograph. The act is still removal; what's gone is the evidence that anything was removed.
Down the Delete column
Read down and Delete gets heavier: each step is the same act, on a machine that keeps track of more.
Bodies
The act stays put while the hardware changes. These are some of the forms Heal takes.
- healing brush
- magic eraser
- content-aware fill