Simple retouching – spot removal

I clearly remember when the Spot Healing Brush was first announced by Adobe. It was at the launch of Adobe Photoshop 7.0 in 2002, and once the presentation was over, there was a stampede to the back of the auditorium to buy the product (which was the thing to do in those days), such was the impact it had on all those portraitists, wedding shooters, and retouching gurus. Overnight, their lives had changed, because no longer did they have to make careful selections, feather that selection, then copy and paste the selected area from one part of the shot to another, then line it up directly over the skin blemish, before blending the copied pixels into the background using Layer Opacity settings.

All that's needed with the Spot Healing Brush is to set the brush diameter a little larger than the target area, click it once, and the blemish disappears. It seemed like magic at the time, but now this tool is totally synonymous with retouching, and can be...