11 Clone Stamp
Without
doubt, this is the most famous digital effect: airbrushing. One
simple tool that lets you add, remove, move or copy any part of your
image. Pimples vanish faster than with Clearasil, stray hairs get
tidied up, foliage gets a pruning and, as we've already seen,
stonework gets seamlessly repaired.
In
Photoshop, cloning doesn't involve sheep or stem cells, just a tool
to copy pixels from one place (reference point) to another (target
point). You set a reference point by holding the [alt] key and
left-clicking, then set the target point by moving the mouse and
left-clicking. After that, the reference point moves as the mouse
does and the left button clones (copies) from the reference point to
the target point. How much is copied depends on settings.
There
are several settings for the clone stamp. The main ones are the size
and hardness of the brush. Size is obvious but hardness defines how
much the effect fades at the edges of the brush. If you have 100%
hardness, your clones will appear as crisply defined circles. I find
50% hardness gives a good balance, blurring the edges so the effect
blends better with the background. There is an opacity slider too.
Beginners should probably leave it at 100%, though you may want to
have a play with it if you have a detail you'd like to fade but not
completely erase.
Although
there is an eraser tool, Wherever possible, I urge you to use the
clone stamp instead. Erasing leaves empty spaces in your photographs
(unless you know about layers, in which case you don't need to read
my book). The clone stamp paints over unwanted detail with something
you actually do want. I'll show you.
This
picture would look tidier without that second wire clipping the
bottom corner. So, using the clone stamp, I'm going to copy some of
the adjacent sky over it.
To
remove that wire, my settings were 200 pixels in size, 50% hardness
and I set my reference point just above the wire (alt and left click
to set the reference point).
You
can, as the name suggests, use the clone stamp to clone something.
Just to show you, here's a cloned swallow.
To
do that, with exactly the same settings, I set my reference point on
the wire next to the original bird and (very carefully) set my target
point further up the wire. That was the tricky bit, taking several
tries to get the twist pattern to match exactly. After that, I just
held the mouse button and moved around until I'd cloned the whole
bird.
Because
it's so obviously identical, there doesn't seem like a lot of point
in doing that but I recently photographed the Red Arrows display
team and they had a plane missing. Because their aircraft are
identical, I could clone in the missing plane and make the formations
look right.
Because
it was a smaller detail, I used a much smaller brush size than for
the swallow. 50 pixels, 50% hardness.
If
I wanted to be really picky, I'd point out that the end of the smoke
trail that's obscuring the last plane wouldn't be there if all nine
planes had been present, because that smoke trail would have been
coming from the cloned plane, not the one in front of it. But that
doesn't matter because I'm not being picky. I actually kept this
photograph with the missing plane. I've only cloned it to show you
what's possible (and easy).
In
this next example, the clone stamp tool is used both as an eraser and
to duplicate detail.
I
wanted to remove the out of focus blade of grass across the
grasshopper's antennae. To do that, I used a small, soft brush (50
pixels, 10% hardness) to clone over the grass, reselecting my
reference point frequently to make sure I was copying the right
details. After removing the grass, I used a harder brush (50% again)
to bridge the gap in the antennae and the yellow grass stem. The
result is an intact grasshopper.
This
really is a lot easier to do than it is to explain. Fiddly, but not
difficult.
If
you can see the edges of the area you've cloned, it's time to tackle
the Opacity setting. A semi-opaque clone stamp can be used to blur
the edges between slight variations in colour or to make subtle
changes to a distinctive feature so it's less obvious that it's been
cloned. Its also better to reduce the opacity when using the clone
stamp to remove pimples from portraits because nothing gets more
scrutiny than someone's face and you really don't want it to look
“touched up”.
I've
cropped this down quite severely because my model would be mortified
if I put her spots on display and she could be recognised. Apart from
the two more obvious spots on her chin, there are a few less
conspicuous blemishes we can deal with. I set the Clone Stamp size to
40, hardness to 10% and opacity to 33%. My reference points were set
as close to the blemishes as possible, to maximize my chances of
getting a good colour match.