Lessons

Lesson Info

The Patch Tool, Content Aware Fill, and the Clone Stamp in Photoshop

this is a client shoot that I did. And for whatever reason, I was like, Oh, this logo just looks weird here because in real life, you see Oh, that's logo. But here you can't really tell the logo. And because it's in the background and it has such a shallow depth of field, it looks like she has something on her shirt. Or I had a dirty lens or like, what is that, s o. I could just get rid of it so we could use the spot healing brush or the healing brush. Or I'll show you a new one just so you can have another trick up your sleeve. The patch tool right here. This is kind of an oldie, but I like it. It's a goodie. I don't think it gets much love anymore, though, so I'll show it to you. We'll give it some love. It works pretty awesomely. You just grab it and then you select. You click and drag like almost like the lasso tools. Same thing, really. You drag a selection around the problem and then you click within the selection and you drag to the solution and then you let go and de select it ...

by pressing commander controlled the and you are done really easy, right? So that's a simple one. You have to think about where you're dragging in this case, her sweater. It's hard to see, but there are some lines, right? So it's got some texture in it, so I don't want I mean, I think I did OK, It's kinda hard to see, but I don't want to take this and just drag. I mean, it might work out, but you want to be mindful that there's a texture there so that you can try to maintain that. The nice thing is that, uh, Photoshopped previews for you. It previews where, like what it's gonna look like. So it's easy to see if you're going to make it worse. So hopefully not another example I can show you. So here's Here's my son in his room and I love this rug. When we were putting his room together, it's from my key of this rug, and I was like, Oh my gosh, I love those stripes. So we have to have that it will be so fun for photos in his room. Well, guess what I could vacuum it every hour of the day and it would never catch him. It's wool. And I don't know if all wool rugs do this, but it's basically a nightmare, Especially when you have cats. Oh, my gosh. So yeah, it's awesome. Uh, because I have Photoshopped. So I took this. This was shot with my phone. Um, I think it's even just my instagram image, but, uh, looks great until you zoom in and then you're like, Oh, my Lanta! Look at all these little fuzzy bits. I mean, they're everywhere, so I could use the patch tool. I could use the healing brush, any of those things. But there are a lot of spots to be fixed. So this is a case where the spot healing brush is just so much easier because it will save me from having Teoh make a source point. And now I can just click and scribble basically, on all of these. I mean, I'm not going to do the whole rock speak of, you know, time. But even the little pieces that are bigger than a spot, I can just I mean, I can trust Photoshopped to do a pretty good job of figuring out you know what to fill it with. If it ever makes a mistake and does what I call a misfire again, I would just he'll over it one more time or just undo it and do another one. And then, of course, if you're monitors dirty this, then you end up fixing spots that don't really exist. So it's helpful to have a clean monitor, but you get the idea. And if I remembered to make the background, we could tuggle it on and off. I forgot to duplicate that. So now we'll just look up here and you can see there's how it was when we started and there's how it is now. So it makes it really easy to clean up if you forgot to vacuum or if you just can't possibly vacuum enough, that can save you another place. I'm just trying to show you guys real world examples, right? So not necessarily all client images that was just one from home. This is a client image, and there's really nothing wrong with this. It's just my own personal pet peeve just to show you another example of where you might use these tools. They're not just for skin or for digital vacuuming. For whatever reason, I really get bothered by these architectural pieces in Does anyone else? I don't know. Maybe it's just me. I try to hide them by, you know, positioning myself. So I'll try toe like when I was shooting in that room. And I would tie toe, have the bride blocking events or the wall outlet hate wall outlets to, um, or they have a camera here. I try to block those things. Exit finds neurologist pet piece. But of course, you can't do that all the time. I could have shot this image tighter. I suppose I could crop them out, but I like that. It's super wide, Um, and you really get this airy sense of all of it. So if I want to take this event out, I could clone it. I could heal it, Uh, or again, this might be a good job for the patch tool to just grab it and do that gun super easy. This one. Lets see. Let's try this. The son might be a little trickier. We have to align it now because we have the line of the where the ceiling meets the wall. We have to keep that, you know, lined up. So I can't just do this. Um, and thankfully, we have the preview to show us why that won't work, in case you couldn't tell. Ah, so I need to keep it in alignment. And then let's see if it Oh, yeah, it totally got that. We could also try. This is a good Let me just reset this image. Let's go back to this event. There's also something called content aware fill that we could also use. So the way that works is you make a selection basically, just like what we did with the patch tool. But then, instead of dragging and patching it, you actually call on content aware fill. So the longhand ways at it. Phil, the short cut is shift F five. Okay, so that's what I usually do. But edit Phil and then from contents, you would choose whatever you want in this case, content aware, so you can fill things with color or patterns. You can even fill it with a history state. In this case, we want content aware, and that means that photo shop is going Teoh study this selection and it's going to make hopefully a good guess about what should be there. So we'll click. OK, and it nailed it. This is a pretty simple example. Content aware fill. Like any somewhat automated command, Um, sometimes is a lifesaver and sometimes is a total air ball. I mean, just missed does not even hit the backboard, but it's fantastic when it works. So this is an example that's really simple. And it worked. Let's try it over here and see how it handles the, uh, continuing of this line. You have Teoh give it some room to breathe. Don't try to select like this like a perfect you know, because you will never get it selected well enough and it just needs some room to breathe. So give it room to breathe and we'll try that shift F five that pops this up. See that? It still says content aware. So click OK? Oh, yeah, didn't handle the wall as well as we did with the patch tool. So in that case I would just commander control Z to undo it and go back to the patch tool and drag it over. And it's done, and that's a lot easier than trying to clone or he'll in this situation. Ah, lot of times you look at a scene like this and you think also easy. It's just blank wall, But there's often very gradual Grady INTs, right? Usually have some shading and shadows up the wall. And sometimes when you're cloning or healing, that can become a nightmare. And you think this is so easy in your cloning or healing. And then suddenly the shadows all weird and it ends up taking you way longer than you thought. So don't be afraid to reach for that patch tool. Lets take on one more look at, um, cloning and stamping and cleaning up stuff before we get into a face swap. We should have time. I think, um, this is another really common thing. So if you're shooting out your shooting landscapes, maybe and there's like you shot this beautiful or maybe an architectural piece. And then there's like a big splatter of bird poop in the middle of something, or a telephone wire that's just annoyingly in the corner somewhere. It's really easy to fix, and these are the types of things that people don't think of when they learn how to use the healing brush of the clone stamp and they get really stuck in thinking, Oh, that's for skin or that's for faces or whatever. And I'll teach someone that and then they'll say, Okay, well, what if I want to remove like a power line and they're not making the connection that it's the same. It's the same thing. It's just instead of his it or scratch. It's a power line, so I want to just drill that point home. Let's actually start when we can dio this right here. Um, so there's three little power lines here, and this is pretty simple. We could try it with the patch tool, but we have this little notch in the architecture, in the stucco or whatever. This is that we need to maintain that little not we could try it, but I just in the interest of time, I haven't tested it with the patch tool, so I'm not sure if it works. So I'm gonna go ahead and grab the clone stamp here, Um, again, just like the healing brush. You want to work on a blank layer, you want to make sure that Oh, that you grab the right tool first of all, So here's the clone stamp. Ah, the keyboard shortcut is s for stamp. And I want to make the, um that's nice. It's still sourcing. Thea other image. Wow, Photoshopped, I'm impressed. Um, so I've got the clone stamp here, and I want to make sure just like before, that it's sampling all layers and that I'm on that blank layer and then I'll make my brush smaller with the left bracket key. And I'm gonna just like we did with the healing brush. The clone stamp needs to have a source point. So we're gonna ault or option click. So I'll hold down alter option, and I'm gonna source this notch right here. So click source, And then I'm gonna come up and thankfully, so I'm not clicking with my mouse yet. I'm gonna line this up, and when I get it in lined, then I'm going to click to paint. Oh, rats. And I just realized I'm painting with 50% opacity, so undo that. I want that at 100 it's at 100 by default. So if you change it in some cases But you want to make sure in this case, I wanted it 100%. So All right, so there is my sample line, this up click, And now I can just paint. And now here I am running out. I'm not able to get that last smidge because my source point rolled off the page. It was a sim it ahead of me, so it ran off the page before we finish this. So that's fine. I'm just gonna let go set another source point, cause look, you can see where it's trying the source. It's still set over here, so I'm gonna click Ault or option click to set a new source point and then finish it off. Okay, So same thing over here, I would maybe make this a little smaller option or all click line this up. Remember that You want to think about leaving room to run for your tail, and we got one more up here. Make this tinier because I'm right up against that. Not There you go. If I scroll down here, we have a couple more things to worry about. And there's some bird poop. What a realistic example. Eso I would just do the same thing. All click cloned this out. And I'm also going to keep an eye like now. I just created this line over here, so I don't want to do that. So I'm gonna move my source point and try this again. There we go. So you really have to watch. Especially when you're cloning. You have tow watch that you, um, aren't like messing up textures and patterns and things. Then I would zoom in on this and we'll see where would be good. I'm going to do this one separately. So I would just come up here and get this. Yeah, See? And I've reintroduced the problem. So in this case, I'm going to just do this. Then I'm gonna let go so the paint can dry, make my brush tinier, and then I'll come up here in source this area to get that cleaned ever so carefully, and I'll source the wall over here to make the line match up and all source this to get rid of this, uh, these little strands of a gas bird poop, Okay. And oh, I guess we're gonna take this whole thing out. Didn't may I just cleaned enough. What am I doing? Did you have a question? Yes, on the on the brush. You've got the preview showing. That's not by default. How do you get that? It should be there by default. I've never I've always have an older version. No, I just Maybe I'm not using the clone stamp very often. Uh um, that's a good question. There is, uh, there's a panel. Groups No. Stop. What am I doing? We have our clone source panel. Is that this? I think it might be. Yeah. The show overlay. So in when you have the clone tool selected up here, this is the brush panel, but this is the clone source panel. Um and that's the option right here to show overlay. I thought it was on by default. Maybe it's not. Maybe you had some special ninja keyboard shortcut that shut it off, but that's how you return it back on. Good question. Yeah. I don't know what I was doing. I don't know why I just took this cable and made it a more attractive cable. I meant to get rid of it. Silly me. Anyway, you get the idea So to get rid of it. You really have to watch your lines. So I would start here and Ault or option click to get that line in place and then could paint down so on. And I'm gonna have to stop because I was about to run the source into this area. So my stroke needs to stop. I'll come back up. I'm also watching this texture that's running vertically here. So now I might source up above and pull down vertically a little bit and then continue on. And then here's another line. So this time I'll stop and source along this edge. Whenever you get two edges, you probably have to stop and change it up a little bit. Um, and this one who there's cracks here and everything. So again, all sources edge. And I knew that he went too far. So I made my stroke too long. Got to keep a night and I'm gonna let go, so I don't have to worry about it anymore, and then I can come up in. I will maintain that bird poop or whatever that is. And this little ledge There we go. So now it's gone, and we maintained the stain on the concrete here, whatever that was