Julieanne Kost's Blog

To paint a straight line, hold the shift key while dragging a stroke. Or, click once with a painting tool, then release the mouse, hold the shift key and click again to draw a straight line between the two points.

PSCS5 – The painting tools which have panels associated with them, display the associated panel’s icon is next to the Tool Preset Picker in the Option bar (in previous versions the icon was located to the far right). For example, with the Brush tool selected clicking on the Brush Panel icon quickly toggles the Brush on/off. Similarly, with the Healing Brush Tool, clicking the Clone Source icon will toggle the Clone Source Panel on/off.

For added flexibility, use the Healing Brush and Clone Stamp tools to clone to blank layers by checking Sample “All Layers” in the Options bar. In addition, you can choose to Sample the “Current & Below” layers. This can be extremely helpful when cloning image layers and adjustment layer information simultaneously.

You can use the Healing brush and Clone Stamp tools between two open documents: Option (Mac) / Alt (Win) -click in the source document and then clone in the destination document.

Using the Healing brush with the blending mode set to Replace makes it behave like the Clone Stamp tool (in that it doesn’t automatically try to blend color or tonality of the source and destination), with one advantage: if you’re trying to clone high frequency image information, the edges of the cloned area will not appear soft as they do with the Clone Stamp tool.