To start things of, let’s see where you find the patch tool. The patch tool is found in the tools palette, it is possible that at first glance you’ll only see the “spot healing brush tool”, which is the default value of this particular tools suite. By holding your mouse down over the spot healing brush tool, you’ll see the patch tool as the third choice in the little tools menu that pop up.

The short cut key is “J”, and here’s another very quick but useful tip: If you have a tool with several sub-tools, holding down the shift key, followed by the corresponding short cut key (shift + J in our example) - you can quickly switch between the tools in the tools suite.

So now on to the fundamental questions; what is the patch tool, and what can it be used for? The patch tool works similar to the clone stamp tool, where you’re able to sample an area of an image and apply it on top of the area you’d like to ‘correct’.

In our sample image, we see a woman that has some kind of black eye (more like blue and red!) underneath her eye. So what we’d like to do is of course eliminate this using the magic of the patch tool.

The patch tool works very similar to the lasso tool when starting off. All you have to do is make a selection by clicking and dragging out an area around the area you’d like to fix. You can also use the lasso tool to make your selection, if you do use the lasso tool to make your selection, make sure you go back to the patch tool for the next steps.

When you’ve made your selection using either the patch tool or the lasso tool, all you have to do is drag outward from starting inside the selection. Drag outwards to an area that you want the sample area to be. So in this case, we of course want the blemish area to look similar to the skin area. The awesome thing with the patch tool is that you always get to see a preview of the area you’d like to patch your selection with. Nifty.

Now drag-n-drop; What should have happened now is that it has sampled our area and applied the corrections on top of your original selected area. To fix other smaller areas, you can either use the clone stamp tool, or use the patch tool again. The blemish is completely gone, and it took around a minute!

So if you’re working on an image were there’s a much larger black eye/blemish and the clone stamp tool might not be the best option, check out the patch tool and practice!