Desktop Photo Editing - The Clone Tool

Sooner or later, every graphic designer has to fix up a scan before using it. When that happens, make sure you know how to use the clone tool in your favourite photo-editor. This tool is sometimes also known as the clone stamp tool or the rubber stamp tool. The tool is circled in red below from a screen shot of the PhotoShop toolbar.
Basically put, the clone tool samples pixels from a selected area and "paints" those pixels into a new area of your selection (as per the logo sample). As a painting device, you can also set the opacity, mode size, and softness of the brush. For best results, find a brush setting with soft enough edges that your cloned areas blend smoothly into where you are applying them.

Practical Uses of the Clone Tool:

1. Removing specks or small blemishes in an image. Simply zoom in closely to where the blemishes are, select a source point close by with similar colouring and lighting, and paint over the areas that need covering.
2. Removing unwanted object such as power lines from a landscape. In this case, it is usually the sky that is the background behind the power lines. Select a fairly large brush size with soft edges, select a similar looking source area, and go to it. The sky and clouds lend themselves very well to being altered by this tool. You'll be amazed at how good the results are in this case.
3. Adding an object or person to an image. There are numerous ways of doing this, but let's start with a simple approach to everyone's favourite pastime, adding someone's head to someone else's body. First, determine that size that you need the head to be when placed in the background image and scale the image with the head to that size. Next, increase the canvas size of the background image so that you have a blank margin in which to paste the head from the source image. After pasting the head in the margin of the shot it is supposed to end up in, select the head and perform whatever colour correction is required for it to look natural in the shot it is being placed in. Then, select the head being painted in with the clone tool and start painting it over the head you are replacing. Don't worry if you encroach on the background a little bit while you are working. After getting the head in place, you can zoom right in and use the clone tool to "paint" background onto the areas where you went "outside the lines."

Once you get familiar with the clone tool, you'll find it to be an extremely powerful tool in your image-editing arsenal. Also, you'll find that by performing the "head replacement" exercise mentioned above, you can learn a lot about whether or not your friends and co-workers have good senses of humour. See you next month!

We strive to be as accurate and current with our information as possible. Due to the infinite number of scenarios that occur in print & desktop publishing, we can not guarantee that the above information will be correct in all situations.