How can I use content-aware repair near high-contrast edges?

Question

I'm often in the situation where there's an undesirable mark or glitch near a high contrast edge in my photos that I'm editing, such as a zit right near someone's lip. If I use the content-aware spot heal tool, the darker area will smear across the boundary and look terrible. My current solution is to airbrush things close to the edge out and then use the patch tool to put the texture back in. Is there a way to cordon areas off so that content-aware only samples from one side of the border?

(I'm fairly new to Photoshop but I'm spending quite a bit of time learning it)

Answer 1

Yes!

Two ways to border off.

One is to create a mask around the lips, then reverse that mask so the lips are "unselected" and do your editing with the content repair.

The other is to copy the section you want to repair, without the lips, onto a new layer, and go to work with that on that.

This second approach is non-destructive to your base image, so preferable, because you can revert/compare at any time to the original.