This is a tool for simply brushing away blemishes, sensor spots or unwanted objects in your pictures. You can ‘dab’ once with the brush for spots or paint over irregular objects. It uses pixels from surrounding areas to fill in the gap, and it works really well with small objects against larger backgrounds. It’s less effective at larger repairs, but worth and try nonetheless.
Photography Plan (Adobe)
A subscription plan which includes Lightroom CC and Photoshop CC. It’s designed for photographers and does offer very good value for money compared to the old scheme, where you paid a much larger amount for a ‘perpetual’ licence, and also had to pay to upgrade to new versions.
Photoshop Express
A free app for tablets and smartphones that offers a selection of quick editing tools and image effects. It does not have anything like the power of the desktop program, but it can still add interesting and useful effects to your pictures.
Photomerge
Image blending technology found in Adobe Photoshop, Elements and Lightroom. It’s used to stitch individual overlapping frames into seamless panoramas, or to merge bracketed exposures into a single HDR (high dynamic range) image.
Patch tool
A tool in Photoshop for covering up blemishes or removing unwanted objects from pictures. You use the tool to drag out a freehand lasso around the offending area, then drag the marquee to a nearby area containing the tones or textures you want to replace it with. It can be very effective although as with all ‘smart’ object removal tools, it’s a bit hit and miss.
Elements
Cut-down version of Adobe Photoshop designed for novices and enthusiasts. It comes with a handy Organizer app for managing your photos, but a lower-powered version of Adobe Camera Raw. You pay outright rather than via subscription.
Content-aware
Image repair tools that can ‘intelligently’ paint over unwanted objects and blemishes using surrounding image data matched to the area being covered up. Photoshop has content-aware repair tools, Affinity Photo offers an Inpainting brush, MacPhun’s Snapheal offers a choice of intelligent object removal tools.