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The Clone Stamp Tool

Lesson 27 from: FAST CLASS: Photoshop for Beginners: Essential Training

Mark Wallace

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Lesson Info

27. The Clone Stamp Tool

If you need to replace an unwanted area in an image, cloning is the way to go. Mark demonstrates how to duplicate areas of an image using the Clone Stamp Tool.

Lesson Info

The Clone Stamp Tool

The clone stamp tool is a lot of fun and it's a little bit of a blast from the past. So I wanna show you how this tool works and also describe to you why, in my personal opinion, sometimes it's a tool that's best left in the toolbox because there are some modern tools that do a much better job of cloning things in an image. So let's dive into Photoshop and open a couple of files. So what we're gonna do here is click file, open, and then let's go down and open Sandy.JPEG. And then also we're going to go file.open and we are going to open Cammy in the Rain.JPEG So we're gonna open these two images to see how this works. So first let's go over here to Sandy.JPEG and I'm going to unlock this bottom layer and I'm going to create a copy, command J, and then let's rename that. And I'm going to say necklace cuz we wanna remove the necklace that Sandy is wearing. So what I'll do here is I'm gonna zoom in to 100%, hit space and use my hand tool. So we go in, so we have this necklace here and I d...

on't think I want this in my image because it's just sort of not pleasing. So what I can do is I can clone it out. So what the clone tool does, is it takes, ah, well let me just show you and we're gonna use sort of a wacky example here. Cloning makes an exact copy. So I'm gonna go over here to the clone stamp tool, make sure you have that selected, and like the healing brush what we need to do is we need to say where the source is and where the destination is. So I'm gonna make this brush a little bit smaller so I'm gonna make it about a hundred pixels, something like that. Okay. Then what I'll do is I'm going to hit the Option or Alt key and click right on her eyeball. So I've set the source. That's where we're gonna come from. And now as I move the cursor, notice that it's got a little eyeball there. If I start painting, So I'm gonna paint on her forehead, notice that it is making an exact clone of her eyeball. So it's not doing what the healing brush does, which is take the texture and try to match it to where you are. This just makes an exact copy. You can paint that. So we're gonna go down here. We have this necklace. I really don't like this necklace. Let's see if we can clone it out. So what we're going to do here is I'm gonna hit Option and I'm gonna choose part of this that I want to replace the necklace with. So I'm gonna say right here, start there. I'm gonna move over. I might have to get a little smaller brush. I'm hitting the brackets to make that brush a little bit smaller and then I'm gonna paint like this. So I'm painting away and you have to do this a little bit slowly. So I'm gonna choose this side over here now. And now I'm gonna paint, paint, paint, paint and I can just work on this and start cloning this out, setting my source, clicking on the destination, go from here to here, going from here to here. And then if I slowly work on this I can get rid of that necklace. So let's go back and review this. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take this flare remove and I'm gonna delete it. So we did that non-destructively, no problem. We're gonna create a new copy and I'm gonna hit control J to do that and then rename this to flair remove two. Okay, now let's do something different. Let's go over here and we've got the patch tool. And so let's just take this go around these things, drag it over, something like that. Let go and look at that. Boom, it's done. So it's much, much faster to use, in my opinion, the spot healing tool, the patch tool the content to wear, move tool, all these tools over here. Those are newer tools than the clone stamp tool to do things. Let's go back over here to Sandy. And then what we'll do is I'm gonna turn off this necklace. I'm going to make a new copy and this new layer. I'm going to say necklace two. So we have a different copy there. And now let's try to remove this using our healing, our spot healing brush tool. And we're going to say content aware. We've got a nice big brush, and now I'm just gonna sort of brush over this gone, gone, gone. So I, and there's some things that I need to retouch there just a little bit, but you can see that the difference between trying to clone something out and getting it all perfect. And just using the proximity match and the content to wear tools and the healing brush are usually much, much better. So you do have a legacy tool that can be used to create some really interesting effects. Sometimes you do need to clone something, but in my opinion, it's better to use the newer tools, the healing brush tools and all of those things to do most of this type of work.

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