How to Use the History Brush Tool in Photoshop

In this article I’d like to introduce you to the often overlooked but very powerful History Brush tool in Photoshop. It’s so easy to use and can avoid the need to make a careful selection of the area to be worked. Once you understand the mechanics of how this tool works then its application is only limited by your imagination. This tool could become your new best friend!

A working knowledge of Photoshop and a familiarity with the history palette is assumed.

We will first look at the mechanics of the tool and then make a few suggestions as to how you might want to use it. The basic premise of the History Brush tool is that you can take a snapshot of an effect applied to an image, remove the effect, then selectively paint it back on to your image. You should read the last sentence again, and then again. It succinctly and completely defines what the History Brush tool is, yet it belies its power.

Before we expand on how to use this tool let me tell you about an operational limitation of this tool that separates it from most of the other tools in Photoshop. The History Brush tool can only be used on the layer on which the snapshot was taken. If this doesn’t sound like it will cause you a problem then it probably won’t – and more power to you. In most photoshop projects you would create a new layer for each effect you wanted to apply, and when you wanted to remove the effect, you would discard the layer! The History Brush tool doesn’t like that. So if Photoshop starts showing you the “forbidden” sign when you move the history brush tool over your image then you might just have discarded the layer you wanted to work on, or you may have selected a different layer than the one you applied the effect or filter on.

So how does it work?

Copy the background layer of the image you want to work on. If your photo has a lot of dust and scratches you could, for example, apply a blur. Using the icon at the foot of the history palette, create a new snapshot. Then step back in the history palette until just before the blur was applied, select the history brush tool, make sure the new snapshot is selected at the top of the history palette, and start painting over the dust and scratches to replace those areas with the blurred effect from the snapshot. It’s a lot easier than it sounds. Plus, you have available all the usual blending modes for the brush, so you can paint the same image over itself in screen mode to lighten areas of the photo. You could use multiply mode to punch up certain colours. You could take a snapshot of a coloured image, de-saturate it and paint back the colours in selected areas. There are an almost unlimited number of options. Get used to how to use the tool and unleash your imagination – the world is your oyster!