Heal, clone or texture?
Heal copies the fine detail from the source, such as skin pores, grain or the weave of a fabric, but keeps the brightness and colour of the area around what you paint. That is why it blends in even when the source is a little lighter or darker. Use it for most repairs.
Clone copies the source exactly, pixel for pixel. Use it when the copy must match precisely, for example to continue a straight edge or a pattern.
Texture copies from a sample box you place over a clean patch. Its Stamp brush is the size of the box: a tap places one copy of the box, so what you selected is exactly what appears. With a Circle, Square or Rectangle brush, Texture instead fills with small patches taken from different places in the box, so large areas of grass, sand, gravel, water or fabric do not show a repeating pattern.
Brush shape and edge. Circle suits most repairs. Square and Rectangle suit straight edges, lines and tiled or pixel-art pictures. A Hard edge changes every pixel inside the brush fully and nothing outside it, so a hard Square or Rectangle covers exactly its size in whole pixels; a Soft edge blends the outer part into the picture.
Each stroke copies only from the picture as it was before that stroke, so the brush never smears what it is covering. Small objects on plain or textured backgrounds are removed most convincingly; a large object in front of a detailed scene may need several strokes from different sources.
Removing a whole object
For something larger than a blemish, choose Remove object. Draw around it with the Lasso, or use the Rectangle, and choose Remove selection. The selected area becomes a checkerboard hole. Fill then rebuilds the background behind what you removed, from small patches of the rest of the picture, continuing the lines and textures that run into the hole. It is for making something disappear, such as a passer-by on a beach, a wire across the sky or a bin on a lawn; it does not copy another object into the hole. If you do not like the result, Try another fill gives a different one; Apply keeps it, and Undo takes it back.
Mirror is the second way to fill. Choose it after removing the selection, then drag the two round ends of the dashed line onto the line of symmetry, for example down the middle of a face, a building front or a vase. The hole gets the mirror image of the other side, with its brightness matched to the edge of the hole. Mirror suits subjects seen straight on; it mirrors everything, including text and details that are not symmetric, and it does not correct for a subject turned at an angle. Any part whose mirror image falls outside the picture or inside the hole is filled from the surroundings instead.
Match lighting helps when the fill comes out lighter or darker than the area around it, for example when it copied from the sunny side of a wall to fill the shaded side. Tick it before choosing Fill: it measures the difference all around the edge of the hole and evens it out smoothly, keeping the fill's texture. It works with both Surroundings and Mirror.
Copy from a spot is the third way to fill, for when you know exactly what should go in the hole, such as another part of the same lawn or another face in the same photo. After removing the selection, choose it, then drag the dashed frame (anywhere inside it, or by its round handle) over the area you want. If that area is larger or smaller than the hole, such as a face further from the camera, drag a square corner: the frame keeps its shape and the copy is scaled to fit. Fill copies the area into the hole as one piece, exactly at the starting size. Before you choose Apply you can still move or resize the frame, and the copy follows when you let go; on a keyboard, the arrow keys move the round handle and plus and minus resize the frame. Tick Match lighting if the copied area is lighter or darker than the hole's surroundings. To copy between two different photos, use Cut Out and Paste Between Photos.
Grow edge adds a few pixels around your outline, so the soft rim and shadow at the object's edge are removed too. To stop the fill taking patches from somewhere it should not, such as a second person, tick Take background only from this box and place the box over clean background. The fill still uses small patches from inside the box; it does not paste the box's contents into the hole as one piece.
What to expect: the fill works best on skies, water, grass, sand, walls and straight edges. A large hole over a busy scene can show repeated patches; several smaller selections often look better than one large one. The fill only reuses what is already in your picture. It does not invent new detail, as generative AI tools do. A large hole on a big picture can take several seconds; the progress bar shows how far it has got, and Cancel stops it.
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