Remove blemishes from a photo

Skin, dust and sensor spots

Blemishes come in many forms. On portraits there are pimples, small scars and stray hairs. On landscapes, dust on the camera sensor shows as soft grey dots in the sky. Old scans pick up specks of dust and tiny scratches. The same brushes remove all of them, and the skin blemish remover works just as well on a product photo with a fingerprint or a speck on the surface.

Larger marks such as a crease across a print, a cable in front of a wall or a stain on a shirt are better handled with the Healing Brush or Remove object, both also free.

Setting the brush

Make the brush only a little larger than the spot; [ and ] change the size as you work. A soft edge, set with Hardness or Shift+[ and Shift+], blends into skin better than a hard one. Click once on small spots rather than dragging, and paint slowly along a longer mark.

On skin, keep the texture. The Healing Brush carries the texture of the clean area you Alt-click into the mark. With the Clone Stamp, lower Opacity or Flow so a copied patch softens a mark rather than covering it completely, which looks more natural in close-up portraits. With a pen or tablet, use the Pen pressure setting.

Checking your work

The Sample setting chooses what the brush draws from: Photo, or Photo with edits, which includes the changes you have already made. Working through a portrait in sections and checking each one at Actual pixels (100%) catches spots you missed. Compare before / after in the View menu shows whether the retouch still looks like the person.

For dust spots across a whole sky, zoom in and move across the photo in strips, so none are left behind.

Less is usually more on faces. Remove temporary marks such as pimples or a scratch, and think twice before removing permanent features such as moles or freckles, which are part of how someone looks.

Free blemish removal, no upload

The Spot Healing Brush, Healing Brush and Clone Stamp are all free, with no limit and no watermark. They work on JPEG, PNG, WebP, PSD and Camera RAW files. Retouching runs on your device, so your portraits and skin close-ups are never uploaded to a server.