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When it comes to portraiture, the work is only half done once you’ve pressed the shutter button. Often, the subjects of your photos will have small blemishes that they really don’t want to live for eternity over their fireplace. One of the best things you can do to turn a photo session into a product sale is to retouch the photos.

If you’re using Photoshop, your primary weapon here is the healing brush. It’s a great tool for quickly and easily removing scratches, pimples, blemishes, and even scars. Even stray hair in the face is no problem once you’ve had some practice. The healing brush blends color and texture to create a nice, even replacement and you’ll never know anything was there to begin with.

While you wouldn’t think so, babies are usually good candidates for retouching. When they’re little, they have razor sharp fingernails and don’t know not to scratch at their face, especially when they get upset. You end up with little scabs, such as in this picture of my son when he was five months old. There were about five more just out of frame in this picture.

Step one, choose the healing brush tool. It’s that icon that looks like a Bandaid.

Step two, choose the brush diameter and edge hardness. You’ll want the diameter to be a little bigger than the blemish you’re trying to remove. The hardness defines how much fuzziness there is around the edges of the patch you’re about to put in place.

Step three, define the pattern for the replacement. Here you’re telling Photoshop what the blemish should look like when it’s fixed. So you want to choose an area that has a similar color, tone, and texture as the area you’re replacing. For example, I wouldn’t take a sample from the shadow side of my son’s face to replace a blemish on the light side of his face. In this case, since the scab falls right on the transition from light to shadow on the bridge of his nose, and the transition falls in a vertical line, I can snag a sample from directly below the scab. I do this by holding down the Alt key and clicking the area. Not sure about a Mac, it’s probably the Command key.

Step four, replace the blemish. Just position the brush over the blemish, and click. The scab instantly disappears and is replaced with even, consistent color that matches the surrounding skin.

I now have a photograph that doesn’t draw your eyes to the scab between my son’s eyes. If I were pitching this photo to a client, I would be much more likely to get a sale from this photograph than I would the original.

Using the healing brush requires a little practice to become really proficient at it. This was an easy fix, but some can be more difficult. Grab some photos you have sitting around, and start retouching them. You’ll see that you get better each photo. And don’t just do portraits or pictures of people; this tool can be used for all kinds of photos. I use the healing brush extensively in my smoke photographs to eliminate stray bits of flying ash that get lit up by the flash.