Raylon451 wrote: … I am just trying to remove a scratch on a finger. I have tried zooming in, cropping and circling rather than brushing
I wonder if this is a matter of "how much zoom?" I took this picture of a random guy in a cafe, and at smaller zooms, I would get the "Identity Protection" pixels. But then I zoomed in so the face took up the entire screen. (I'm not showing his whole face, here, of course.) But with his face filling the screen I used Clean Up to remove the part in his hair.

Clean up is indeed a bit weird-- I always have to try several times to get it to know just what I want to erase. But I didn't get pixelation here, even though this was clearly a face on the screen.
This is the full picture:

It's the guy on the right-- you can see that this was quite a zoom!