Photoshop Clone Stamp Tutorial

Video Transcript

"Adobe Photoshop is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated, and I am in no way affiliated with Adobe. Okay, so this tutorial I'm going to be showing you guys basic clone tool on your Photoshop CS3. Clone tool is over here, as you can see, on your left-hand side. Clone stamp tool, and the shortcut for that is "S". There's also a pattern stamp tool, but for today we're just working with the clone stamp. Now the clone stamp is very effective, everybody loves it, this is one of those things that gets the beginners in Photoshop hooked with Photoshop, because it's such a cool thing. Basically with the clone tool you--a lot of times I like to set my hardness in and around twenty to fifty percent. And I don't like to make it extremely hard, because whatever I'm trying to clone--unless I want there to be extreme detail, I'd bring it to hard. But for this tutorial, we're just going to use a brush that has light hardness. Also, you want to keep your opacity at a hundred--you know, a hundred percent, or if you want to bring it down you can bring it down, but for this I'm just going to use what I got. So I've got my clone stamp rocked and ready to go. I'm going to do a--something that's just showing you what it's doing it. So if I click on alt and hold alt, as you can see here, you can see my pointer turned into a target. So that is the selected target. If I click with my mouse while the alt button is holded onto this, I can click and if I want to move over to my sky, and then I click without holding on the alt, it's going to put a part of the mountain into the sky. So now you kind of get the idea of what the clone stamp does. It's basically cloning a portion of wherever I select, and putting it somewhere else in my photograph. So now, what I really want to use it for, is to help take the dust off--I have a lot of dust on my camera lens, so what I want to do is I want to actually take dust off this photograph, and I have a panorama photograph here, as you can see. I'm going to go slowly back and forth across this whole thing, and I want to start like right here. For--and then, the easy way to zoom in Photoshop is by holding the command or control key in PC, and hit the plus sign, and you can actually bring your picture up to you a little better. And as you can see up here, I have a million dust artifacts in my camera, and in the sky. And so what I want to do is basically sample pieces of my picture with the clone stamp. I want to sample right there, and then click over that, and as you can see, that little piece is gone. And I can do the same thing with this one just by holding alt and getting it--but as you can see, you can actually tell that there has been something done to this photograph right up there. I mean, it does not look normal, that little round dot that I just did. So basically what you want to do is get in really, really tight, and sample something maybe from there, from the side, instead of below, and click. And now it looks a whole bunch better, and although you can still see--and that's why I said you want to keep your hardness down. And in fact, if I brought my hardness down, it would probably look a million times better. So, if you want to make your clone brush bigger, it's the same thing as a regular brush, right bracket makes it bigger, left bracket makes it smaller. Click, and as you can see, it looks a little bit better. It's not as hard; it doesn't look as fake. Same thing with over here; we can just clone out all the dust on the camera. Now, this may take some time, and there is other ways of using the clone stamp, but for this tutorial I'm going to end off just like this, showing you the real basic clone stamping techniques. Thank you. "