Cloning or Using the Rubber Stamp
The clone tool, sometimes called the rubber stamp tool, is a very
popular tool with most digital photographers. It allows you to paint
part of the image over another part of the same image. This is
incredibly useful as it allows you to remove things that you don't
want in your photo or to add things that you do want in your photo.
Below are several examples of images that have been cloned. In
the top set, the rather distracting power line and the tree in the
corner have been removed. In the bottom example, I used the clone
tool to add people into the picture of the goats. The bottom two are
the original pictures. (Note, the final has been
cropped.) Source
To use the clone tool you must select the part of the image that
you want to copy. This is called the source. In the top example, I
chose a part of the sky above the line I wanted to replace as the
source. In many programs, you must click the mouse in combination
with a key on the keyboard (Alt or Shift) to designate the source.
Destination
Once you've done that, choose a brush size and paint over the
area you wish to cover. This is called the destination. In this
example, I painted with a small brush over the power line. Most
programs display two cursors when using the clone tool. One shows
the brush that's painting, the other designates the source where the
information is pulled from.
Painting over the blue sky was relatively easy as long as I was
careful to make sure the source blue was very close to the
destination blue. The hardest part of this job is where the line
crossed over the tower on the left. I used a new source - a part of
the tower - to replace that section of the image.
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In this example, I cloned the two people from the
bottom right into the image with the sheep on the bottom left to create
the top image.
For most
cloning jobs, use more than once source. Continually choosing a
new source mixes the textures to improve the appearance of the image
and eliminates repetitious patterns.
More advanced programs allow you to
change the opacity or transparency of the tool. Painting with
partially transparent tools blend textures and patterns to create new
portions of your image. |
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