Now, in this lesson, we are going to be taking a look at tools that copy one portion of an image onto another portion of an image. you may recall back in lesson one, we went ahead and copy those trees on top of each other in front of the Stanley Hotel. Well, that is called cloning. That is the term for it.

We are going to learn all about cloning inside this lesson, how it applies to the clone stamp tool, first and foremost and then we will move on the healing brush and the patch tools. Now, I want you to open up two images. One is called aged01.jpeg, and the other one is called light_fabric_photo_spin.jpeg. It is from the Photo Spin image library and the aged01, I shot at the Victoria and Albert Museum. They are both inside the Lesson 9 folder which is inside the Part 01 folder which is inside of course the Project Files folder that you copied from the DVD to your hard drive.

Now, I would like you to go over here to the toolbox and see this little guy right there at the clone stamp tool. I want you to click on it to select it or press the “S” key for stamp. This tool goes ahead and paints from one section of the image onto a different section of the image.

Now, I am going to go ahead and increase the brush size a little bit by pressing the right bracket key until I get about an 80 pixel brush. Not necessary that you follow exactly along with me because we are just playing at this point to get a sense for how this tool works.

Do not just start in painting. If you do, Photoshop will get angry with you. And when Photoshop is angry, that is not a good thing. What it does is it barks at you. It brings up an air message telling you that you need to set a source point because before you can paint from one portion of the image onto a different portion of the image, you have to specify what you want your source point to be, where do you want to clone it from.

You do that by pressing the “Option” key or the “Alt” key on the PC and click in. That is all you have to do, just a single click. And I want to have an option click right there on this part of the ear, on this guy’s head. That would be an Alt click on the PC. Then, I am going to begin dragging, just a little farther up. So, they sort of clone two ears on top of each other. And notice, you can see as I drag, you can see two cursors. You can see around brush cursor and below that you can see a crochet source cursor. So, it shows me what I am cloning from the cross and where I am cloning it to the circle.

Notice as I drag, I got the cross and the circle on new portions of the ear, that Photoshop is not cloning the new portion of the ear, it is always cloning the old portion of the ear. So, I am always cloning from the original which is really a great thing. This is not always the way it was inside Photoshop. They have to fix this. Once upon a time, I used to just sit there and replicate over and over again and it just sort of ruin the reality of the tool. Not that what I am doing right now is too super real, mind you, but still.

Now, I am done dragging, we got two ears on top of each other at this point. What if you want to fade things out a little bit? I am going to do that. I am going to paint some more stuff here. I could just start painting in like that some more because I have to find my source point and I could just go ahead and paint a little more if I wanted to.

Notice that my new brushstroke is aligned with my old brushstroke. So, my edits are aligned with each other and that text to this check box right there that says aligned. So, that makes sure that each and every brushstroke I apply is aligned with that very first brushstroke. That could be a handy thing for matching different healing strokes with each other but I am going to go ahead and back step a little bit, “Command+Z” and then “Command+Option+Z”. That would “Ctrl+Z”, “Ctrl+Alt+Z” on the PC if you are diligently following along with me.

This is an interesting use of the tool. Sort of duplicating ears on a guy’s head, I suppose. What is more accurate use of the tool? Something you might actually want to do with