Clone Stamping
What we will be doing is opening an image, removing some bits we don't want and leaving the bits we do want in.
This tutorial assumes that you have know how to open Photoshop and have some idea of where the various tools are. Don't worry too much if you don't, because I'll be telling you where to find each tool as we use it. Here you can see the original image and here you can see the one we will end up with:
The first thing you want to do is open up the image you want to work with. You can open up one of your own, but for the sake of this tutorial, its probably best if you use the one on this page to start with. If you are using Internet Explorer, right click on the image and choose "Save Picture As..." from the pop-up menu. Save it to your hard drive and open it up in Photoshop. As soon as you have opened it, save it again, this time in the Photoshop .psd format. There are all sorts of reasons for this, but most important is because when you do save it occasionally, you will also save any layers you create. Thats not so important for this tutorial, but it is good practice.
Ok, so now we have Photoshop open and an image called "roo1.jpg" on the screen. I took this image at Edinburgh Zoo when I went there and the closest I could get was through that fairly nasty wire fence. That might sound ok to you, but I'm Australian and I miss seeing those silly furry things. I wanted to get closer!
The first thing to do is to duplicate the layer we are looking at. If you don't have a full grasp of layers yet, don't worry as I will be taking us through them in a future tutorial. For the moment, just follow what we are doing.
If the Layers pallete isn't on the screen, go to the "Window" menu at the top of the screen and click on the word "Layers". That will bring it up and ready for you to start working on it.
At the top right of the Layers Pallette, you will see a little black arrow. Click on it and you will see a menu like the one in the image below. Choose "Duplicate Layer..." from the menu and when the dialogue box pops up, name the layer "working" or "doing stuff" or whatever you like really. Click Ok and you have the layer ready to work with.
Underneath your new layer though, you will see the original layer which is called "background". You can delete that layer by dragging it into the little rubbish can at the bottom of the pallette or you can hide it by clicking on the little eye, as I have done in the image below.
Right, now we can actually start working!
The tool we will be working with is called the Clone Stamp tool. I find it amazingly useful to get rid of bits and pieces I don't want in images. (I actually started out using this tool to remove spots and freckles from photographs of members of my family - you would be surprised at the reaction)
The tool can be found in your main 'toolbox' which is usually at the left of the screen when you open Photoshop up. If its not on your screen at all, go to the "Window" menu at the top of your screen and click on the word "Tools". The toolbox will appear.
The tool is generally fairly easy to find and looks like a little rubber stamp like bankers use.
If its not showing though, it may be because its hidden under another tool. Some of the buttons on the toolbox you can see, have a tiny arrow to the bottom right. What they mean is that there are other tools underneath that one. If you click and hold one of the buttons with the tiny arrow on it, you will see a fly-out with a few other tools on them. You select them by keeping the mouse button pressed down and moving the mouse over the tool you want, then releasing it. The tool you selected will then be in use.
Now, this is where you have to pay attention to what you are doing if you want a really good effect. What we want to remove is the links in the fence we can see, but leave the Kangaroo (its actually a Wallaby) still in the picture. Since it would look pretty silly with bits and pieces cut out of it, we are going to 'fill in' the bits the fance covers over with carefully chosen sections of the wallaby itself. The best part of this is that it happens in one fairly simple operation. The operation might have to be repeated a few times, but you can see the effect straight away.
Using the tool which looks like a magnifying glass, click and drag a square around the wallaby's tail.
When you release the mouse button, your window should have zoomed in fairly close to the wallaby's tail. Reselect the clone stamp tool and change the size of the brush to about 5 pixels.
Since the entire tail of the wallaby is in shadow, this part is going to be fairly easy. Choose a section of the wallaby's tail which is fairly close to a part which is obscured by the fence and hold down the ALT button on your keyboard. Click once on the section of tail you chose and let go of both the mouse button and the ALT key. I chose the fairly fat section of tail which is directly below and to the left of the main part of the link which is obscuring the tail.
If you now click directly on the link which is obscuring the tail, you will see that the pixels under the cursor are changing colour. Whats happening is when you ALT-clicked on the section of tail, the Clone Stamp tool copied or "cloned" the section you ALT-clicked on. When you now click on the section of the image you want to replace, the cloned section of the image is copied onto the section you want gone, down to the last pixel. Since we set our brush size to a round 5 pixel brush, we are replacing the fence link with a five pixel wide section of the wallaby's tail. It doesn't sound like much when you think about it in five pixel lots, but you will be surprised how quickly the unwanted parts disappear.
Remember when you are doing this, that if you find you can't seem to get it looking 'right', you can choose another section of the tail to clone from and go over it again. I used about six different places to clone from to get the image to the stage you see below.
Now, to carry on and finish getting rid of the fence is achieved by simply following those same steps, keeping your attention on the light and the where you get each clone from. You don't have to clone close to the section you want rid of either - sometimes it helps keep the integrity of the image if you clone from a place on the other side of the image than the section you are replacing. Its just a matter of looking at the patterns. If you need to increase the size of the brush, go ahead, but you should also remember, the larger the brush size, the more fake it will look. If you stick to about five to ten pixels, it will look ok.
If you are using this tutorial image I have provided, you will find the head very tricky. Its not impossible though. All the information is there. Take your brush size down to three or even two pixels in diameter and work with care. You will find it helps a lot if you actually think about what the subject you are altering is. In this case, think carefully about what a kangaroo or wallaby's head looks like. Using care, you will get it looking pretty close to right.
When you have finished taking the fence off, you will probably fancy a beer, but don't go just yet. We have a couple of finishing touches to do.
Go to the "Filter" menu at the top of your screen and choose "Sharpen" then "Unsharp Mask". In the dialogue box which pops up, set the "Amount" to 40%, the "Radius" to 1.5 pixels and the "Threshold" to 5 levels. Click Ok and you should see a fairly faint but noticeable difference to the image.
And you are done!!
You will find all sorts of things you can do with this technique. Taking spots off people, taking people out of images, moving fences, taking unsightly power lines out of images, there is no real end to the times you can use it.
I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and found it useful. I'll be coming up with more and more as time goes by, so keep an eye out for them.
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