Retouching tabThis tab offers full set of brushes to fix artifacts on the image manually.
Shortcuts:
Use Right mouse button to switch to the source image and to drag the
image.
Use Mouse wheel to change brush size.
+
Use Shift+Mouse wheel to change an active slider. For example, you can
click Intensity slider and then change it with the mouse.
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Use Shift+Left click to draw line between two points.
Common parameters:
 Brush
size slider defines the size of a brush in pixels.  |
 Brush
hardness slider defines the form of a brush edge.  |
 Intensity
slider defines the strength of a brush effect. |
The Fill contour
button ( ) lets
you fill the outlined area with the same brush. You can use this command
to apply all brushes except Delete scratches and Distort brush. |
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The Undo/Redo slider and the buttons let you easily undo and redo your actions on this tab. The number on the slider indicates the quantity of points. The percentage in brackets shows the share of the points that are currently visible on the screen. If you set the slider to 0%, it means that all your actions are canceled.
Undo button cancels the last stroke. A stroke is a set of points in one continuous line. Redo button brings back the next point. So you are able to make a big step backwards (cancel the whole line) and then proceed point by point.
or 
+Z.
The keyboard shortcuts for Undo are Left arrow and Ctlr-Z
or +Y.
The keyboard shortcuts for Redo are Right arrow and Ctlr-Y
The Reset button undoes all the operations on the Retouching tab. But you can apply all of them again by moving the undo/redo slider to 100%.
or
+ Use Right click
or Ctrl+Left click to set a new source area.
The intensity slider defines the opacity of the area to copy.
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This is a smart brush which automatically fills the area under the brush with neighboring pixels. This brush is optimized to fix small artifacts such as wrinkles, scratches, pimples, etc. |
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Normally the brush changes its orientation according to the mouse movements. Such mode is sufficient for areas with fine or no texture.
If the scratch is crossing some edges, lines or coarse texture, it is better
to use a manual orientation so that the brush is perpendicular to the lines
it is crossing.
+ or 
Use Ctrl+Mouse wheel or Up/Down keys to change orientation of the brush.
Keep Ctrl key pressed to fix orientation of the brush
The area between short lines and a circle is used to fill the area inside of a brush circle. For example, you can also easily "erase" wires on the image below by dragging the brush.
| Using autooriented brush | Using manually oriented brush to minimize artifacts |
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The brush clones the texture from its sides, so the texture is preserved.
| Original image | Resulting image after only one click |
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You can use this brush to paint with the selected color or to change a hue keeping the brightness and saturation intact. You can select a brush color in tree ways: If the Keep the brightness option is checked the brush changes the tint (hue). The Intensity sliders changes to Saturation slider. It lets you change the saturation of the applied color. To keep an original saturation, set slider to 0. |
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TIP: This brush enables you to fix a reddish skin very easily. Select natural skin color from the same person with Color picker, then turn on Keep the brightness option and paint with the brush over a reddish face. Fine tune the Saturation slider is to get a natural look.
| Selecting natural skin color from original image | Applying the brush |
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This brush increases or decreases a saturation of affected pixels. If the Intensity is positive, the colors become more vivid. Use Intensity of -100% to make the selection monochrome (grayscale). |
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The blur brush (negative intensity) can be used to smooth noise or artifacts in the selected areas. You can also blur background to emphasize the foreground (often in portrait photos). The sharpen brush (positive intensity) can be used to selectively sharpen some areas (e.g. trees) but keep other areas (e.g. skin, sky ) intact. On the example below the background was slightly blurred and the foreground sharpened to emphasize the depth of field. |
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This brush uses Aggressive algorithm to reduce noise only in the given areas. A default value of the Intensity slider is set to detected noise level in the same way as it is done on the Noise tab. Higher values of the Intensity slider mean that more details will be considered noise and removed. |
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This brush desaturates a pupil of the eye and makes it darker. The brush tries to define edges of the pupil so it can be used when the pupil is not round. The Pupil darkening slider defines brightness of the desaturated pupil. The value of 50 means that the brightness is reduced by 50%. |
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This brush lets you locally distort the image. You can fix such problems as face expression, thin lips, protruding ears, etc. The Both directions checkbox lets you stretch or squeeze the image area symmetrically relatively to a brush center. Use this option to make prolonged objects like lips or legs thicker of thinner.
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+ or Use Ctrl+Mouse wheel or Up/Down keys to change orientation of the brush.
Keep Ctrl key pressed to fix orientation of the brush
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This brush lets you clone the sky from external image. The primary goal of the brush is to replace an overexposed sky with more appropriate one. Please do not forget that using completely different sky type will make the image look unnatural due to differences in lightening, shadow directions, etc. Please note that Intensity slider changes the opacity of the whole sky image. If you want to make only a part of the sky semi-transparent, please use Erase changes brush later on. Tip: when painting near the horizon, set Edge sensitivity to maximum value and paint with single clicks. The Open sky library button opens a folder with the sky images supplied with the program. You can copy your own image to this folder. The Open user's sky button opens previously used folder to load user's image with the sky. The Horizon level slider lets you squeeze the sky image so that the final image looks more natural. |
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This brush is designed to erase selectively the effect of the previous brushes. You can restore the pixels to the state they were before retouching or even to the their original state.
If the Restore to original option is checked then the program will restore the pixels from the very original image as it was loaded from the disk. If the option is not checked, the program will restore pixels to the state before retouching. This option makes a difference only if you have applied some filters (brightness, colors, etc.) before calling the retouching filter.
To show or hide Help panel of Helicon Filter use 
button from the toolbar or View->Help panel command in the main menu.
),
the effect to external circle is applied only if the color is similar to
those in the internal circle.
Clone brush
).
)
to select the target area and apply the brush.
Delete scratches brush
Change brightness brush
Change color brush
)
lets you select a color from the current image simply by clicking an appropriate
area. The selected color will then be shown in the rectangle under the
sliders.
)
opens a standard dialog to choose a color from the palette.
)
contains some predefined colors such as skin or sky colors and lets you
add your own colors to this list.
Change saturation brush
Blur/Sharpen brush
Reduce noise brush
Fix red eye brush
Distort brush 
Replace
sky brush
Erase changes brush