Remove a spot, keep the skin

One press does four things. It reads a neighbourhood around the point you pressed and builds a low-frequency copy of it. It walks two rings of candidate positions — forty-eight in all, at two and a bit and three and a bit brush-widths out — and scores each on two terms: how closely its tone matches the destination across sixteen probe points, and how much texture energy it carries of its own. It picks the lowest total. Then it writes the candidate’s texture over the destination’s tone, feathered by the hardness setting.

The second scoring term is the one that matters and the one most tools omit. A candidate patch that happens to match in tone but contains a pore cluster, a hair or the edge of a freckle will transplant that feature onto the place you just cleaned, and it will sit there looking exactly like what it is. Penalising a candidate’s own high-frequency energy is how the brush finds quiet skin rather than merely nearby skin.

Because the tone under the stroke is the destination’s own, the result carries no edge. That is not a blend being tuned — there is nothing to blend, because only the texture moved.

Blemishes before smoothing, always. A dark mark left in place when the skin layer runs does not disappear — the smoothing pass reads it as low-frequency tone and spreads it into a soft grey patch several times its original size, which is harder to remove than the spot was. The stack enforces the order internally, but the point stands for how you work: clean the discrete marks, then decide how much texture to take.

Zoom to 200 with the 2 key before you start and pan with a drag. Size the brush so the drawn ring clears the mark by a little. Press once per mark rather than scrubbing; each press is one scored transplant and repeating it in the same place stacks two of them. If a stroke lands badly, undo it and move the brush rather than healing over the heal.

What the brush runs on

Candidates scored per stroke

48, in two rings

Ring distance

2.2× and 3.4× the brush radius

Probe points per candidate

16, on a spiral

Cost terms

tone match + 0.8 × own texture energy

Brush size

8 to 180 across, [ and ] on the keyboard

Hardness

0 to 100%, backslash steps it

Strokes kept

30, undone one at a time

Stored as

position, radius and hardness in fractions of the frame

• It cannot heal a mark that spans a feature edge. The sample ring has to sit on skin of roughly one tone. A blemish lying across a nostril, a lip border or the rim of a shadow gives the scorer nothing clean to find, and the honest move is two small strokes rather than one large one.
• It is not built to remove things from a background. A ring a few brush-widths across cannot reconstruct structure, so a doorframe or a shoulder behind the subject comes back smeared. That is a different algorithm and a different site.
• It keeps thirty strokes, not the session. Past thirty the oldest is dropped from the history, and reloading the page clears everything, because nothing here is written down anywhere.

How is this different from a clone stamp?

A clone stamp copies a neighbourhood wholesale, pixels and all, which is why cloned skin repeats a mole or a pore cluster a centimetre away and reads as fake to anyone who looks at full size. This samples a ring of candidate patches around the mark, scores each on how closely its low-frequency tone matches the destination and on how little texture of its own it carries, and transplants only the winner's texture onto the destination's tone. The seam is the tone that was already there, so there is no seam.

How large should the brush be?

A little larger than the mark, and no larger than that. The ring is drawn on the picture so you can see it before you press. If the brush is much wider than the blemish it starts carrying the tone of whatever else falls inside it — the edge of a nostril, a lash, a lip — and the transplant brings that with it. Square brackets resize it in steps; backslash steps the hardness.

It left a pale patch where the spot was.

The ring landed somewhere that is genuinely a different tone from where the spot was — near the edge of a shadow, on the turn of a nose, or across a lighting boundary. Undo the stroke, shrink the brush so the sample ring stays on one plane of the face, and press again. On a mark that sits right on a feature edge, two smaller strokes from either side usually beat one large one.

Can I remove a mole permanently, or a scar?

You can remove either from this photograph, which is all any editor does. Whether you should is a different question and this tool has no opinion about a particular face. What it will not do is treat this as skincare: nothing here diagnoses, treats or affects a skin condition, and no claim about skin or appearance follows from moving pixels in a picture.

Can it take the person out of the background?

No, and it is not a permission that is being withheld — the engine is wrong for it. This brush assumes a small mark on a broadly continuous surface and finds its replacement in a ring a few brush-widths across. A stranger behind a subject needs a large structured region reconstructed from a much wider context, which is a different algorithm with different failure modes. That work belongs to pictureeraser.com.

How many strokes can I undo?

Thirty are kept, and each is undone individually from the end. They are stored as operations rather than pixels — a position, a radius and a hardness in fractions of the frame — so the full-resolution export replays them against the full-size picture instead of enlarging a preview. That is also why undo is instant regardless of how large the photograph is.

• Skin smoothingOpens with the skin layer at 25 per cent, which leaves three-quarters of the texture.
• Flash red-eyeLooks for red pupils as soon as a picture opens, and asks before it changes one.
• How far is too farWhere the caps sit, why they are there, and what the distance readout is measuring.
• The retoucherEvery layer at zero, the working region waiting to be placed.