The purpose of this mini-lesson is to demonstrate some of the simple ways to fix up blemishes or smooth out roughness. The Heal tool is very easy to use, and is essentially a one-spot clone. You can see more about the Heal tool in our earlier mini-lesson, #8 Healer - Doing More with the Heal tool.

The Blur tool is effective for simple softening of rough patches of skin, but be careful to use it lightly, as it can make the skin look unrealistic if used too heavily. It is still a better choice than using the Smudge tool in most cases, as it does not creates streaks.

Pro tips:

The Heal tool uses the brush hardness, so a softer brush will fade more quickly from the center.

The Heal tool also follows the shape of the brush, so if you use the rectangular block (second brush shape in standard set), the cloned part will be rectangular. This can be useful for dealing with scars or other elongated blemishes (and also for copying rectangular objects such as pencils).

In a future mini-lesson, we will show the Wavelet Decompose plugin, and how to use it for more sophisticated photo retouching (as well as some fun tricks for digital art).

Gimp manual references: the Heal tool, the Blur/Sharpen tool and the Smudge tool.