Spot healing brush tool no longer works correctly

[dukeeastwood]

for about a week now anytime I try the spot healing brush tool it no longer works like it used to... no matter what I try (changing the hardness, changing the layer I'm sampling from, changing the size of the brush) nothing helps now that the tool isn't working. What I'm seeing is ring around every retouch that is obvious and not seamless like the tool used to do. Imagine one retouch that looks wrong now being in place of every single retouch you try, even ones that used to be , and should be, seamless... but no... you get a big, ugly,  discolored line around the outside of the brush click....

nothing like being on a time crunch and then finding that the Adobe product you depend on just isn't working properly anymore.

[Sahil.Chawla]

Hi Dukeeastwood,

Sorry to hear about the spot healing tool not working properly, could you please let us know which exact version of Photoshop you're working on and which operating system are you using?

Could you please try resetting the preferences of Photoshop and let us know if it helps with the issue?

Preferences Reset Photoshop - Preferences

Make sure that you backup customer presets, actions and brushes before restoring the preferences to default.

Regards,
Sahil

[Steelbar123]

I reset Preference Reset Photoshop by following the link and than used 

Using the Preferences dialog

That reset all my prefrences but it worked

Thanks

Bruce

[Mohammad.Harb]

In the Option bar,  is the Mode set to Normal and the type  Content-aware ?

[Stargem116]

Thanks, this guided me to the solution. I just had to make sure my tool was "sampling all layers." 

[gbmar]

Thanks for this tip.  I had somehow switched from normal mode to color.

But as a side benefit I learned that there's a sampling version of the regular healing brush tool that's pretty handy!

[gener7 · Accepted solution]

Sometimes tool settings get changed around and yet there is a way back to defaults.

Right click on the tool and select "Reset Tool"  I try this before trying a preference reset because I have to restore some items a preference reset takes away. It does reset the brush as well, but if the brush settings were thrown off, it will fix that as well. Tools and Dialog boxes have their own resets and should be the first thing to try.

And you should see this:

[savagequest]

Tried this, all settings match the screenshots above and the tool just paints black on the canvas it never manipulated the image or object no matter what layer you have selected. 

[Mel5CC9]

Thank you - worked for me!

[angie_taylor]

This happens because the default setting for Spot healing is Content Aware - which generally works better. However older versions of PS used Proximity Match as a default (I think, off the top of my head!) so try switching to that or Create Texture, to see if you can replicate the old behaviour.

[thomasl16731772 · Accepted solution]

None of the above advice helped me, but after I closed and reopened the file the Spot Healing Brush started working.

[angie_taylor]

Well that should really be our default answer for everything! 😉 nine times out of ten it fixes the issue. Thanks for letting us know 🙂

[ilinas64965902]

Unfortunately, restarting didn't resolve the issue for me.

I have the same problem, and switching from content aware to proximity match didn't help either.

[Monasette]

Same here!

[theyeofk]

Unfortunately these suggestions didn't work for me either.

Restarting PS worked, but only briefly. ALL TOOLS were rendered useless again after I used lasso/content aware fill combo. And reseting the tools doesn't seem to fix the problem.

So I said screw it, I'll just continue using the lasso/fill, but even the that won't work after its first use. Even after reopening.

Bummer. These wedding photos will be taking much longer than I expected lol.

[Lukas Kawalec]

Try opening a new document, see if the brush works there. If it does, try copy pasting all the layers, channels, etc, from the old one to the new one.

[tiffanyb8358600]

Make sure that "sample all layers" is selected. The setting should be:

Mode: Normal

Type: Content Aware

Check the box for Sample All Layers

[dani12777]

Thank you, did the trick for me. Have a good day!

[Nguyễn5E27]

 it works for me, thank you very much.

[Omar28958888fnwx]

ur a legend

[santoshk57792484]

Worked for me!

[chrisk11883799]

Nothing worked for me. My Healing brush just puts a copy of my image on top of my image and then when I Alt click and my cursor hits the image it locks on and moves to image around. I have done resets on tools and preferences to no avail. Tried opening a new image and shutting down and reopening Ps but nothing works.

[maryf92262899]

This worked for me, also...thank you!

[NormCh]

I have had the same problem and what I found is that if I used the spot healing it would select the object but see to hang at that moment.  If I scroll the image (forcing a screen refresh) the healing brush did actually work.  I suspect this is something to do with my graphics card & or it's driver.  (my graphics card is about 8 years old now and I am seeing some issues like this in Photoshop CC and ON1 Photo Raw)  The difference is ON1 seems to be able to fix these issues rather quickly.

[NormCh]

Photoshop update 23.1 fixed my screen refresh problem. Spot healing works properly now. It also fixed several other small glitches. Photoshop does not recognize my graphics card but at least now when I run the graphics card test, the program does not crash.
Thanks for the update 🙂