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The Clone Stamp Tool

Lesson 53 from: Adobe Photoshop CC Bootcamp

Blake Rudis

The Clone Stamp Tool

Lesson 53 from: Adobe Photoshop CC Bootcamp

Blake Rudis

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Lesson Info

53. The Clone Stamp Tool

Next Lesson: The Patch Tool

Lessons

Class Trailer
1

Bootcamp Introduction

16:22
2

The Bridge Interface

13:33
3

Setting up Bridge

06:55
4

Overview of Bridge

11:29
5

Practical Application of Bridge

27:56
6

Introduction to Raw Editing

11:00
7

Setting up ACR Preferences & Interface

07:39
8

Global Tools Part 1

16:44
9

Global Tools Part 2

20:01
10

Local Tools

22:56
11

Introduction to the Photoshop Interface

07:13
12

Toolbars, Menus and Windows

25:07
13

Setup and Interface

11:48
14

Adobe Libraries

05:57
15

Saving Files

07:39
16

Introduction to Cropping

12:10
17

Cropping for Composition in ACR

04:44
18

Cropping for Composition in Photoshop

12:40
19

Cropping for the Subject in Post

03:25
20

Cropping for Print

07:34
21

Perspective Cropping in Photoshop

07:11
22

Introduction to Layers

08:42
23

Vector & Raster Layers Basics

05:05
24

Adjustment Layers in Photoshop

27:35
25

Organizing and Managing Layers

15:35
26

Introduction to Layer Tools and Blend Modes

21:34
27

Screen and Multiply and Overlay

09:15
28

Soft Light Blend Mode

07:34
29

Color and Luminosity Blend Modes

12:47
30

Color Burn and Color Dodge Blend Modes

07:43
31

Introduction to Layer Styles

11:43
32

Practical Application: Layer Tools

13:06
33

Introduction to Masks and Brushes

04:43
34

Brush Basics

09:22
35

Custom Brushes

04:01
36

Brush Mask: Vignettes

06:58
37

Brush Mask: Curves Dodge & Burn

06:53
38

Brush Mask: Hue & Saturation

07:52
39

Mask Groups

05:52
40

Clipping Masks

04:11
41

Masking in Adobe Camera Raw

07:06
42

Practical Applications: Masks

14:03
43

Introduction to Selections

05:42
44

Basic Selection Tools

17:41
45

The Pen Tool

11:56
46

Masks from Selections

04:22
47

Selecting Subjects and Masking

07:11
48

Color Range Mask

17:35
49

Luminosity Masks Basics

12:00
50

Introduction to Cleanup Tools

07:02
51

Adobe Camera Raw

10:16
52

Healing and Spot Healing Brush

14:56
53

The Clone Stamp Tool

10:20
54

The Patch Tool

06:38
55

Content Aware Move Tool

04:56
56

Content Aware Fill

06:46
57

Custom Cleanup Selections

15:42
58

Introduction to Shapes and Text

13:46
59

Text Basics

15:57
60

Shape Basics

07:00
61

Adding Text to Pictures

09:46
62

Custom Water Marks

14:05
63

Introduction to Smart Objects

04:37
64

Smart Object Basics

09:13
65

Smart Objects and Filters

09:05
66

Smart Objects and Image Transformation

10:57
67

Smart Objects and Album Layouts

11:40
68

Smart Objects and Composites

10:47
69

Introduction to Image Transforming

04:34
70

ACR and Lens Correction

09:45
71

Photoshop and Lens Correction

14:26
72

The Warp Tool

11:16
73

Perspective Transformations

20:33
74

Introduction to Actions in Photoshop

09:27
75

Introduction to the Actions Panel Interface

05:06
76

Making Your First Action

03:49
77

Modifying Actions After You Record Them

11:38
78

Adding Stops to Actions

04:01
79

Conditional Actions

07:36
80

Actions that Communicate

25:26
81

Introduction to Filters

04:38
82

ACR as a Filter

09:20
83

Helpful Artistic Filters

17:08
84

Helpful Practical Filters

07:08
85

Sharpening with Filters

07:32
86

Rendering Trees

08:20
87

The Oil Paint and Add Noise Filters

15:08
88

Introduction to Editing Video

06:20
89

Timeline for Video

08:15
90

Cropping Video

03:34
91

Adjustment Layers and Video

05:25
92

Building Lookup Tables

07:00
93

Layers, Masking Video & Working with Type

15:11
94

ACR to Edit Video

06:10
95

Animated Gifs

11:39
96

Introduction to Creative Effects

06:08
97

Black, White, and Monochrome

18:05
98

Matte and Cinematic Effects

08:23
99

Gradient Maps and Solid Color Grades

12:20
100

Gradients

04:21
101

Glow and Haze

10:23
102

Introduction to Natural Retouching

05:33
103

Brightening Teeth

10:25
104

Clean Up with the Clone Stamp Tool

08:07
105

Cleaning and Brightening Eyes

16:58
106

Advanced Clean Up Techniques

24:47
107

Introduction to Portrait Workflow & Bridge Organization

14:47
108

ACR for Portraits Pre-Edits

21:27
109

Portrait Workflow Techniques

18:46
110

Introduction to Landscape Workflow & Bridge Organization

12:17
111

Landscape Workflow Techniques

37:36
112

Introduction to Compositing & Bridge

06:59
113

Composite Workflow Techniques

34:01
114

Landscape Composite Projects

24:14
115

Bonus: Rothko and Workspace

05:15
116

Bonus: Adding Textures to Photos

07:05
117

Bonus: The Mask (Extras)

05:18
118

Bonus: The Color Range Mask in ACR

04:54

Lesson Info

The Clone Stamp Tool

Now, the clone stamp tool can be a lot of fun to use. Especially if you look at this image that we see right here. So this photograph, if we look at it right now, looks like there's nobody on the street, and it looks like there's no cars there, right? Watch what happens when I do this. It uses the clone stamp tool, and the patch tool to clone every car and every human being off of the street using the data that's available right there within the image. It can be a very powerful asset to even clean up a street like this. There's the before, there's the after. Before, after. So there's a lot more control that you can get over your cloning with the clone stamp tool than with any of the other tools, because of the ability to select very specific areas in your image, and also be very literal about what it's going to select. So, just as always, we have an example here, that works out really well for this. If we take the clone stamp tool, which is right here. The clone stamp tool works very m...

uch the same way as the healing brush, the regular healing brush, where we take an example of an area that we want to clone, and then we go to the area and we paint it in. The settings are all very much the same as well. We have a brush. If we look at that brush, we're using a soft edge brush at a size of 100. No blend mode, opacity set to 100, flow set to 100, and here we have current layer, current and below, and all layers. Again the best practice here is to get into current and below, and do all of your stuff on one layer. So, current and below. This is gonna be my clone layer. You notice how it's already got the selection from the image before saved in the clipboard, so to speak, of the clone stamp tool. So I'm gonna move this up, make this a little bit bigger. Press alt or option, click here, move here. Click here, move here, okay, and paint those areas out. Really easy on areas like this, but when I get to an area like this, I need to go ahead and alt or option, click right here, and then start finding an area that doesn't have a repeated pattern to paint that back in. Notice how this one is like a paint brush. If I move this, and I click and I drag over, it's gonna give me the look, it's gonna give me exactly what it sees on the other side, and then as I paint around, it's going to be selecting from that other side, and fixing that spot as well. Now if we turn this on and off, looks like we have something really funky happening right there. Let me step back a little bit, press command or control z, and then I'll select from this area. Oh what happened is because it's not selecting like the healing brush, and why it made that gray mark happen there, is if I go and I select this area, and I start painting here, and move too far over, it's gonna start taking the gray area that's on the other side over here, and that's why I had that gray line right there. You can see we can start painting that area in. So it literally takes whatever is in the image, and replaces it on your photograph without healing it. Now if we were using something like the healing brush, that gray area might not end up finding its way in there because it's assessing the pixels around it and healing that area instead. Control, alt, z, step back. Again we'll just click right here and then paint right here, and it's a literal selection from that area. So if I were to take something like this red area. Click right here, and paint right here. It's taking the red from up there. If I were to click on the green area, it's taking the green, and right there. Now what you're gonna see is something like the patch tool is completely different, it's really kinda cool when we get into that. So I'll press alt or option, again, it gives you, when you press alt or option, and you click somewhere else on the image, it's going to give you a preview of exactly what you're gonna be putting on there. So if we look up here, it's giving us a preview of that magenta that we'll be placing on there. Which is a pretty cool concept because you can see before you actually do anything, what the result is gonna be, without actually clicking. Press alt or option, click here, and just start filling in that area. Again it might not be nearly as clean as something like the healing brush. Because again we're using a very soft edge brush, and that's a difficult brush to use on something that has patterns. It might be better to do that with something like a hard edge brush, on something that has patterns in it, because then I can literally select that dot, come in here and make sure that that dot matches up with the other dots, and now it's a better clone. But again, at all costs we're trying to avoid repeating patterns, and we'll talk about that when we get this image, and we open up this image here, and I start talking about the clone tool. So, I'll zoom into say this area right here, and I wanna get rid of this car. So if I wanted to get rid of this car, I would probably use a soft edge brush, and I would take alt or option, a smaller brush, alt or option, click right here, and notice I'm not just clicking any random spot. I'm not clicking here, to then paint right here. I see this line on the street. I need to repeat that line, and if I start to replace detail there, where detail should be, then you're gonna start to see a fuzzy kind of pattern appear. So if I press, I can take anyone of these lines on the street and end up replacing this. So I'll press alt or option on say, this line right here, and I'll just start painting away. See I'm matching up that line, making sure that that line work always stays the same. If I get a little over spray over here, just make my brush a little bit smaller. Make that selection, pop it over, and it's a slow process. It can be a slow, and very tedious process to fill in these areas. Alt or option, and then paint in over here. Alt or option, paint in over here. Again I'm trying not to break detail. If you look right here, I've broken this detail. So alt or option, click right here, move this over, clean that up, alt or option, click right here. If you click and hold and paint, it will select the literal areas, even though those areas are covered up. So what I mean by that is, if I were to just do something like this, if I were to alt click right here, and paint this in, like this. See how this that we get a little disconnect on that divider of the street. If I press control z to back up there. The better way to do that, is if you hear me clicking a lot, I'm clicking a lot because I'm resetting what that clone stamp tool's gonna be selecting. So now if I dare to do this, and click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, it's actually not gonna bring that divider over anymore, because it's when I, every time I click, it's making a new selection from the area that I told it to, by pressing alt. So I'm gonna go back a little bit, and then I'll zoom out. This is a really big dust spot on my sensor. So big that it's showing up black, that's probably a literal piece of dust. I'll just click here, fill that in, clean that up, and that car is now gone, and I just talked to you about habit. I cloned on the actual layer, and not a new layer. So let's go ahead and make a new layer. It's okay because I wanted that gone anyway. Perfect, right, yeah, I meant to do that. So what we're gonna do now though, is because we're gonna do something a little bit trickier, and that's gonna be these people, and this walkway. You're thinking well how are we gonna get rid of those people, and maybe that specular reflection there, that specular hide that we have there from the rain. Well, if I press alt or option, I can look at any of the detail that's happening within this crosswalk, find an area from it, and replace it with another area from the crosswalk. So I'm gonna click right here, alt or option, click on this spot, and just use that to cover up this area. I'm gonna get a little bit more precise there with that corner, and even the slightest movement of your wrist is gonna change what it's gonna select from. So then, maybe grab this one right here, and just fill in that area to get rid of that orange. Orange is gone. Anyone wanna see me remove the people? Let's do it. I'm gonna click right here. Again, see I'm taking little clicks. But now I need to reset, so I'll grab from here. We, boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. And now those people are gone. Ah, it's crazy! So now, after looking at this image, you can see how long it probably took me with that clone stamp tool to go through this entire photograph to do this. I do have to tell you something else, that's gonna include something like the clipping mask with the clone stamp. This is a really cool way that you can use a part of an image on another part of an image, and not necessary heal it like we would the healing brush, but heal with something like the clone stamp combined with like the curves adjustment layer. So, if I were to zoom into this car right here. I'm gonna make a new layer, and let's say I wanna take an area that, I'm gonna fill that in with maybe part of the back here, it's a darker area. I'll just grab my brush, make it a little bit bigger. Alt or option, click right here, and start clicking around this car. Now notice how that's a very dark spot compared to the other spot? Well, if I really needed the data from down here, to replace this data, that's all I had, I could still use that clone as my source, I could just come down to the clone, to the curves adjustment layer, press alt or option, make a clipping mask in there, and now I can alter the tones of that patch. Boom, look at that, isn't that crazy? So now, this patch has replaced, we've replaced that area, used the data from a different part of the image that was darker, and then used that curves adjustment layer to make it blend in perfectly. Sometimes you might have to do this, and remove a color cast from that area while you're doing that. Other tools aren't quite as intuitive as our brain is, so when we know that there's a color cast, when we go from one spot, to another spot, not only can we adjust the tones, by modifying the RGB curve, but we can even go into the reds, the greens, and the blues of that channel and change that too. So let's say there was a color cast in here, and I wanna remove some of the blue. If I bring this down, it's gonna add a little bit of yellow to that area too. That's a lot of yellow, that's a lot of blue, and now we're adding a little bit of yellow to that area on top of that tonal adjustment, to make it match even better.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Photoshop Bootcamp Plug-In
Textures
Clouds
Painted Backgrounds
1 – Intro to Photoshop Bootcamp
6 – Intro to Raw Editing.zip
11 – Interface and Setup
16 – Intro to Cropping and Composition.zip
22 – Intro to Layers.zip
26 – Intro to Layer Tools.zip
43 – Intro to Selections.zip
50 – Intro to Cleanup Tools.zip
58 – Intro to Shapes and Text.zip
63 – Intro to Smart Objects.zip
69 – Intro to Image Transforming.zip
74 – Intro to Actions.zip
81 – Filters.zip
88 – Intro to Editing Video.zip
96 – Custom Effects.zip
102 – Natural Retouching.zip
107 – Intro to Portrait Workflow.pdf
110 – Intro to Landscape Workflow.zip
112 – Intro to Compositing.zip
115 – Rothko and Interfaces (Bonus Video).zip
33 – Intro to Masks and Brushes.zip
106 - Frequency Separation.zip

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Amazing course, but don't be fooled into thinking this is a beginner's course for photographers. The problem isn't Blake's explanations; they're top. The problem is the vast scope of this course and the order in which the topics are presented. Take layers for example. When I was first learning Photoshop (back when we learned from books), I found I learned little or nothing from, for example, books that covered layers before they covered how to improve/process photographs. These books taught me how to organize, move, and link layers before they showed me what a layer was actually for. Those books tended to teach me everything there is to know about layers (types of layers, how to organize them, how to move them, how to move them two at a time, how to move them two at a time even if there are other layers between the two you're interested in, useful troubleshooting tips, etc. ) all before I even know (from a photographer's point of view) what it is the things actually do. The examples of organizing, linking, and moving mean everything for graphic designers from Day One, but for photographers not so much. Blake does the same thing as those books. Topics he covers extremely early demand a lot of theoretical imagination for a photographer who doesn't already know quite a bit about what he is talking about. Learning about abstract things first and concrete things later only makes PS that much harder to understand. If you AREN'T a beginner, however, this course is amazing. I thought it would be like an Army Bootcamp, taking you from zero and building you into a fit, competent Photoshop grunt. Now I think it's more like Army Bootcamp for high school varsity jocks. It isn't going to take you from the beginning, but the amount you'll get out of it is nonetheless more than your brain can imagine. I've been using PS for years to improve my photographs, and even to create the odd artistic composite or two. The amount I've learned in the first week is amazing, and every day I learn something -- more like many things -- which I immediately implement to improve my productivity and/or widen the horizons of what I can achieve. If you ARE a photographer who's a Photoshop beginner, I'd take very seriously the advice Blake gives in the introduction: Watch one lesson, and practice the skills and principles you learn in that one lesson for two weeks. THEN watch the next lesson. You can't do that of course without buying the course, so it's up to you to decide whether you'd like to learn Photoshop and master Photoshop all from the same course. Learning it first and mastering it later will cost more money, but I think you'll understand everything better and have a much more enjoyable ride in the process. As for me? I'm going to have to find the money to buy this course. There is simply way too much content in each lesson for me to try to take on all at once, but on the other hand I don't want to miss anything at all that he has to share.

Robert Andrews
 

Blake Rudis is the absolute best in teaching photoshop. His knowledge and how he presents the instruction is clear and concise - there is NO ONE BETTER. Yes, his classes require some basic skills, and maybe I'd organize the order of (or group) the classes in a different order, but, let me be clear - if anyone is to be successful or famous in the Photoshop world, it should be Blake Rudis. I strongly recommend his teaching. I started photography and post processing in 2018, and because of this class, I'm know what Im doing. The energy you get when you create something beautiful is profound, it makes you bounce out of bed (at 4AM) like a 5 year old, to go create. It's a great ride! Thanks Blake, & Thanks Creative live.

Esther Gambrell
 

WOW!!! I've been purchasing CL classes for several years now and have watched HOURS of "How-To Photoshop" classes, but this is the first one I've actually purchased because of the AWESOME BONUS content!!! SERIOUSLY??!!?!? A PLUG-IN??? But not only that, Blake is SO easy to understand, and he breaks down concepts in different ways to connect with different people's learning styles. I REALLY appreciated this approach because I am a LEFT-BRAINED creative that has an engineering background, so I really connected to what Blake was saying. THANK YOU FOR THAT! There are TONS of Photoshop courses out there, but I found this one to be the most helpful in they way Blake teaches concepts so that you know WHY you're doing what your doing. I feel like he taught me how to fish with Photoshop to feed me for a lifetime instead of just giving me a fish to feed me for one day. This is the BEST overall PS course out there!!! Thank you!!!!

Student Work

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