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The Clone Stamp Tool

Lesson 34 from: Photoshop for Beginners: Essential Training

Mark Wallace

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Lesson Info

34. 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.

Lessons

Class Trailer
1

Class Introduction

00:52
2

Introducing Photoshop

02:37
3

The Class Materials

01:36
4

How To Open Files

01:42
5

Using The Home Screen

02:35
6

Exploring The Interface

03:30
7

Getting Additional Help

01:36
8

Understanding Workspaces

05:11

Lesson Info

The Clone Stamp Tool

the clone stamp tool. It's a lot of fun and it's a little bit of a blast from the past. So I want to show you how this tool works and also described 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 dot jpeg. And then also we're going to go file dot open and we are going to open a commie in the rain dot jpeg. So we're gonna open these two images to see how this works. So first, let's go over here to Sandy dot 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 Because we want to remove the necklace that sandy is wearing. So what I'll do here is I'm going to zoom in to 100 hit space and use my hand tool. So we go in, we have ...

this necklace here and I don'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 uh 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. Just gonna make it about 100 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. Okay, so that's what it's doing. Let's look at a more practical example of how you might use this because 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 an option and I'm gonna choose part of this um 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 going to 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 if I slowly work on this, I can get rid of that necklace. Okay, so that's how that works there, just like that. Alright, so we've gotten rid of that necklace. I could keep painting that and get rid of it. Let me go over to cami in the rain to show you a couple of other things and then I want to show you, in my personal opinion why this tool is something that you might not want to use. So we're going to double click, go to 100% cami in the rain and we see that we have this lens flare here that's coming in. We want to get rid of that. Let's go to the background layer, unlock that and I'm gonna hit cancel. I hit that too many times and then I'm gonna hit Control command J to make a copy nondestructive editing. And then I'm gonna say flare remove. So we have a layer that we can work on. Okay, let's see if we can take some of this area and put it over here to clone this stuff out. Now notice that we have an issue and that this is blue, this is black. So when we take from this area and put it over here, probably not gonna match very well. So we have to do a lot of different adjustments to make this work. So to see this little better, I'm going to zoom out just to touch something like that. Use the hand tool to navigate. And now let's get our clone tool and let's make this a much larger brush. So I'm gonna make this about a 200 pixel brush, something like that maybe even bigger. Well let's do 380 pixels. Okay, something like that. Now what I need to do is say where to start from. So I'm gonna hit this key on my keyboard. We're going to sample an area over here. So I'm going to just click over there and now I'm going to start painting and so I can clone this out but as we suspected colors don't match. So if I go down here I can start painting this out and it's just a little bit problematic. It would take me quite a while to fix that. And so the clone tool is really cool because you can do some interesting things but for removing things in an image. I think the healing brush tools are much better. So let's go back and review this. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to take this flare remove and I'm gonna delete it. So we did that non destructively. No problem. We're going to create a new copy and I'm gonna hit control J to do that and then rename this to flare, 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 to content aware, move tools. 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 are 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. Don mm hmm gone. So I know there's some things 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 aware 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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Ratings and Reviews

Katie
 

Mark did a great job at explaining things and going over them multiple times throughout the lessons. My only issue was that sometimes it went a little faster than I could keep up and I needed to rewind it a bit and start again. But from someone who has never worked in photoshop before I 100% recommend this class to anyone trying to learn.

Terri Schwartz
 

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