Strange behaviour of the heal tool
While the heal tool works fine in most cases, sometimes there's something that I don't fully understand: while I'm moving the reference point everything is fine, but when I release the mouse button to finalize the mask, the healed area changes intensity (typically becomes lighter) jeopardising the whole thing.
See linked screen recording.
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This is a case where you may be better off with clone vs heal. Heal is blending with the underlying original pixels. Since the camper is white, it is lightening the source pixels to better match the target area's tone.
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While the white camper might be the problem and clone would probably work better, sometimes I have this kind of behaviour trying to heal parts of the sky (for instance branches — and sometimes it works, so the influence of the “healed” portion is not always obvious).
BTW, if I want to heal a portion of image, what's under the mask should be not so relevant; what is relevant is the area around the mask that should be blended.
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While you are right that it is what is round the healing target that matters, I suspect that it may be helpful not to paint too small an area for healing. If you paint only over the camper van with a small margin round it, what you are painting over is predominantly light, and the heal result you get is going to be light. The van is so large that quite a lot of the interior parts mask is surrounded by light pixels - only the other edges of the mask are surrounded by the darker green branches of the tree. The narrowish margin by which your mask goes beyond the outline of the van doesn't give the tool much to work with. I suspect that if you were to paint your mask much wider round the van the result might be a bit better, but of course in this scene that isn't really possible. Probably the Capture One healing tool would do a good job of removing the rock from the bottom left corner if you wanted to do that, but for removing such a large object as the van, you are asking it to go rather beyond what it is best at. Maybe pixel editors such as Affinity Photo or Photoshop have tools better suited to this task.
(And if the scene were a bit different, Walter Rowe's suggestion of the clone tool is one I would agree with. But you'd have to work quite hard to build up a plausible reconstruction of the hidden parts of the tree using a clone tool. The Affinity Photo inpainting brush, or regenerative fill in newer versions of Photoshop, might deal with it in a fraction of the time.)
Ian
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Going to add some further info... The photo used in this thread was in the end properly processed with the clone tool, rather than heal, as already suggested, and it worked fine. But in some cases the real problem could be the presence of masks. Look at the few minutes here from the latest Paul Reiffer's live:
https://youtu.be/TlhlOe-YYHI?t=2241
Actually, I run into photos where a weird behaviour was trigged with the clone tool, and it was caused by a mask in a similar way as Reiffer demonstrated. In some rare other cases I have strange behaviour with the dust remove tool (in the final image I see the area affected by the tool slightly lighter or darker) and it seems related as one might deduce from a comment in Reiffer's live.
I suspected it was related to the ordering of layers (layers can be reordered) but it isn't; it seems rather related to the order you performed editing. In the end, it seems that applying dust/spot tool and heal/clone is more appropriate, and masks should be done later.
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I think that the order of payers is irrelevant - they are not layers in the same sense as layers in apps such as Photoshop or Affinity Photo, where layers affect everything underneath them.
But I had a case a few days ago where I had used the heal tool to remove something in the sky - a dust blob, or a bird, or something and it showed up oddly. It turned out that I also had a gradient mask with a luma range that overlapped that part of the sky. As soon as I reopened the luma range tool, it sorted itself out and the blemish was properly healed out.
Ian
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