Using the Clone Stamp tool - Photoshop Tutorial

- In this chapter, we're going to take a look at cloning healing and a little bit of magic inside Photoshop known as Content-Aware Fill. And it's all in the name of retouching or repairing a photograph. Whether you want to cover up some blemishes, get rid of some details, or even add details to a photograph. And so here we are looking at a photograph that I captured while caged diving with some great white sharks. I'm very pleased with the shark itself, but I'm not that fond of these fish, especially this one coming out of the shark's chin. And so I'm going to clone over them using the simplest retouching tool there is, which is the Clone Stamp Tool. Now notice when I move my cursor into the image window then I see that universal no icon. And that's because, here inside the layers panel, I have this type layer selected that represents my website. In order to use the Clone Stamp Tool, you have to select a pixel based image such as this flat background. So I'll go ahead and switch to it. After which point I have a little brush cursor. Now I want you to notice that if I were to just start painting with this brush, Photoshops, going to get angry at me and tell me that I haven't identified a source point. And so, I'll just go ahead and click okay to accept that message. What you need to do, is press and hold the alt key or the option key on the mark and click on some detail that you want to repeat. Now, just for the sake of demonstration, I'm going to alt or option click in the center of the sharks eye and that will identify the area that I want to clone. Now, currently I have a very small brush, so I'm going to right click inside the image window to bring up this size value, and I'm going to take it up to 200 pixels, and I'll also take the hardness value just again, for the sake of demonstration, up to a hundred percent. And I'll press the enter key or the return key on the mark to accept that change. And now I'll paint anywhere inside the image. And you can see that I am repeating that eye. So notice that there's a big cross right at the center of the eye that's telling me the source of my cloning and notice that it moves along with me as I brush inside the image. I also want you to see this checkbox up here in the options bar, that reads a line. By default it's turned on, which means that as you continue painting, you are going to align all of your brush strokes. And again, you can see that big cross moving over on the left hand side of the shark. And so as a result, each one of your brush strokes align with each other. If that's not what you want, then you can turn the aligned checkbox off at which point you will once again, start cloning from the shark's eye. So notice that the new brush stroke does not align to the previous ones. Alright now, at this point the image is a mess. And I'm not getting anywhere we're getting rid of these fishes concern. So I'll press control Z or command Z on the mark as many times as it takes in order to get rid of all those bad brush strokes, and then I'll press and hold the Z key in order to get the zoom tool, and I'll click a couple of times on this little blurry bit of fish right here. Alright now what you want to do is right click inside the image window and reduce your size value. Let's say to 30 pixels. And you also typically want to take the hardness value down to zero percent so that you get nice soft transitions. Next I'll press the alt key or the option key on the mark to turn my cursor into that target right there. And I'll click in an empty portion of that ocean in order to set a new source point. And now notice as I paint over the fish that I see it go away, I also see that big cross that is telling me the source. So the cross represents the source the brush is the destination. Alright now I want to paint a way this fish and I want to do so, not from that original location, but from a relative position above the fish here in this neutral area of the ocean. And so I'll turn the aligned checkbox back on. And I want my brush to be a little bigger, so you don't have to scrub back and forth. And one way to do that is to once again right click inside the image window and then increase the size value. But that gets a little tedious. So I'll just escape out. And I'll show you a trick that works specifically with an American keyboard. So if you are using a US style keyboard, then notice just right of the PS and pound Key, you have two square bracket keys in a top right region of the keyboard. If you press the right bracket key, you'll make the brush incrementally larger as you're seeing right here. If you want to make the brush incrementally smaller, then you press the left bracket key. You can also press and hold either of those keys to make the brush very big, very quickly, or much smaller, very quickly like so. In any event, this brush looks pretty good to me. And you can see the size of the brush listed on the far left side of the options bar. Alright so once again, I turned on the align check box. and so as I paint over that fish, I'm going to see the source of my cloning identified by that big cross. And that is how you get rid of unwanted details by painting with the image itself, using the Clone Stamp Tool.