Lessons

Lesson Info

The Clone Stamp Tool

Now, the clone stamp tool can be a lot of fun to use. Especially if you look at this image that we see right here. So this photograph, if we look at it right now, looks like there's nobody on the street, and it looks like there's no cars there, right? Watch what happens when I do this. It uses the clone stamp tool, and the patch tool to clone every car and every human being off of the street using the data that's available right there within the image. It can be a very powerful asset to even clean up a street like this. There's the before, there's the after. Before, after. So there's a lot more control that you can get over your cloning with the clone stamp tool than with any of the other tools, because of the ability to select very specific areas in your image, and also be very literal about what it's going to select. So, just as always, we have an example here, that works out really well for this. If we take the clone stamp tool, which is right here. The clone stamp tool works very m...

uch the same way as the healing brush, the regular healing brush, where we take an example of an area that we want to clone, and then we go to the area and we paint it in. The settings are all very much the same as well. We have a brush. If we look at that brush, we're using a soft edge brush at a size of 100. No blend mode, opacity set to 100, flow set to 100, and here we have current layer, current and below, and all layers. Again the best practice here is to get into current and below, and do all of your stuff on one layer. So, current and below. This is gonna be my clone layer. You notice how it's already got the selection from the image before saved in the clipboard, so to speak, of the clone stamp tool. So I'm gonna move this up, make this a little bit bigger. Press alt or option, click here, move here. Click here, move here, okay, and paint those areas out. Really easy on areas like this, but when I get to an area like this, I need to go ahead and alt or option, click right here, and then start finding an area that doesn't have a repeated pattern to paint that back in. Notice how this one is like a paint brush. If I move this, and I click and I drag over, it's gonna give me the look, it's gonna give me exactly what it sees on the other side, and then as I paint around, it's going to be selecting from that other side, and fixing that spot as well. Now if we turn this on and off, looks like we have something really funky happening right there. Let me step back a little bit, press command or control z, and then I'll select from this area. Oh what happened is because it's not selecting like the healing brush, and why it made that gray mark happen there, is if I go and I select this area, and I start painting here, and move too far over, it's gonna start taking the gray area that's on the other side over here, and that's why I had that gray line right there. You can see we can start painting that area in. So it literally takes whatever is in the image, and replaces it on your photograph without healing it. Now if we were using something like the healing brush, that gray area might not end up finding its way in there because it's assessing the pixels around it and healing that area instead. Control, alt, z, step back. Again we'll just click right here and then paint right here, and it's a literal selection from that area. So if I were to take something like this red area. Click right here, and paint right here. It's taking the red from up there. If I were to click on the green area, it's taking the green, and right there. Now what you're gonna see is something like the patch tool is completely different, it's really kinda cool when we get into that. So I'll press alt or option, again, it gives you, when you press alt or option, and you click somewhere else on the image, it's going to give you a preview of exactly what you're gonna be putting on there. So if we look up here, it's giving us a preview of that magenta that we'll be placing on there. Which is a pretty cool concept because you can see before you actually do anything, what the result is gonna be, without actually clicking. Press alt or option, click here, and just start filling in that area. Again it might not be nearly as clean as something like the healing brush. Because again we're using a very soft edge brush, and that's a difficult brush to use on something that has patterns. It might be better to do that with something like a hard edge brush, on something that has patterns in it, because then I can literally select that dot, come in here and make sure that that dot matches up with the other dots, and now it's a better clone. But again, at all costs we're trying to avoid repeating patterns, and we'll talk about that when we get this image, and we open up this image here, and I start talking about the clone tool. So, I'll zoom into say this area right here, and I wanna get rid of this car. So if I wanted to get rid of this car, I would probably use a soft edge brush, and I would take alt or option, a smaller brush, alt or option, click right here, and notice I'm not just clicking any random spot. I'm not clicking here, to then paint right here. I see this line on the street. I need to repeat that line, and if I start to replace detail there, where detail should be, then you're gonna start to see a fuzzy kind of pattern appear. So if I press, I can take anyone of these lines on the street and end up replacing this. So I'll press alt or option on say, this line right here, and I'll just start painting away. See I'm matching up that line, making sure that that line work always stays the same. If I get a little over spray over here, just make my brush a little bit smaller. Make that selection, pop it over, and it's a slow process. It can be a slow, and very tedious process to fill in these areas. Alt or option, and then paint in over here. Alt or option, paint in over here. Again I'm trying not to break detail. If you look right here, I've broken this detail. So alt or option, click right here, move this over, clean that up, alt or option, click right here. If you click and hold and paint, it will select the literal areas, even though those areas are covered up. So what I mean by that is, if I were to just do something like this, if I were to alt click right here, and paint this in, like this. See how this that we get a little disconnect on that divider of the street. If I press control z to back up there. The better way to do that, is if you hear me clicking a lot, I'm clicking a lot because I'm resetting what that clone stamp tool's gonna be selecting. So now if I dare to do this, and click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, it's actually not gonna bring that divider over anymore, because it's when I, every time I click, it's making a new selection from the area that I told it to, by pressing alt. So I'm gonna go back a little bit, and then I'll zoom out. This is a really big dust spot on my sensor. So big that it's showing up black, that's probably a literal piece of dust. I'll just click here, fill that in, clean that up, and that car is now gone, and I just talked to you about habit. I cloned on the actual layer, and not a new layer. So let's go ahead and make a new layer. It's okay because I wanted that gone anyway. Perfect, right, yeah, I meant to do that. So what we're gonna do now though, is because we're gonna do something a little bit trickier, and that's gonna be these people, and this walkway. You're thinking well how are we gonna get rid of those people, and maybe that specular reflection there, that specular hide that we have there from the rain. Well, if I press alt or option, I can look at any of the detail that's happening within this crosswalk, find an area from it, and replace it with another area from the crosswalk. So I'm gonna click right here, alt or option, click on this spot, and just use that to cover up this area. I'm gonna get a little bit more precise there with that corner, and even the slightest movement of your wrist is gonna change what it's gonna select from. So then, maybe grab this one right here, and just fill in that area to get rid of that orange. Orange is gone. Anyone wanna see me remove the people? Let's do it. I'm gonna click right here. Again, see I'm taking little clicks. But now I need to reset, so I'll grab from here. We, boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. And now those people are gone. Ah, it's crazy! So now, after looking at this image, you can see how long it probably took me with that clone stamp tool to go through this entire photograph to do this. I do have to tell you something else, that's gonna include something like the clipping mask with the clone stamp. This is a really cool way that you can use a part of an image on another part of an image, and not necessary heal it like we would the healing brush, but heal with something like the clone stamp combined with like the curves adjustment layer. So, if I were to zoom into this car right here. I'm gonna make a new layer, and let's say I wanna take an area that, I'm gonna fill that in with maybe part of the back here, it's a darker area. I'll just grab my brush, make it a little bit bigger. Alt or option, click right here, and start clicking around this car. Now notice how that's a very dark spot compared to the other spot? Well, if I really needed the data from down here, to replace this data, that's all I had, I could still use that clone as my source, I could just come down to the clone, to the curves adjustment layer, press alt or option, make a clipping mask in there, and now I can alter the tones of that patch. Boom, look at that, isn't that crazy? So now, this patch has replaced, we've replaced that area, used the data from a different part of the image that was darker, and then used that curves adjustment layer to make it blend in perfectly. Sometimes you might have to do this, and remove a color cast from that area while you're doing that. Other tools aren't quite as intuitive as our brain is, so when we know that there's a color cast, when we go from one spot, to another spot, not only can we adjust the tones, by modifying the RGB curve, but we can even go into the reds, the greens, and the blues of that channel and change that too. So let's say there was a color cast in here, and I wanna remove some of the blue. If I bring this down, it's gonna add a little bit of yellow to that area too. That's a lot of yellow, that's a lot of blue, and now we're adding a little bit of yellow to that area on top of that tonal adjustment, to make it match even better.