Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [184]
Clone stamp brush settings
As with all the other painting tools, you can change the brush size, shape and opacity to suit your needs. When working with the clone stamp I mostly leave the opacity set to 100%, since cloning at less than full opacity can lead to tell-tale evidence of clone stamp retouching. However, when smoothing out skin tone shadows or blemishes, you might find it helpful to switch to an opacity of 50% or less, and you can also use lower opacities when retouching areas of soft texture. Otherwise I suggest you stick to using 100% opacity. For similar reasons, you don't want the clone stamp to have too soft an edge. For general retouching work, the clone stamp brush shape should have a slightly harder edge than you might use normally with the paint brush tools. When retouching detailed subjects such as fine textures, you might want to use an even harder edge so as to avoid creating halos. Also, if film grain is visible in a photograph, anything other than a harder edge setting will lead to soft halos, which can make the retouched area look slightly blurred or misregistered. If you need extra subtle control, lower the Flow rate; this allows you to build an effect more slowly, without the drawbacks of lowering the opacity.
1.
The best way to disguise clone stamp retouching is to use a full opacity brush with a medium hard edge at 100% opacity. It is also a good idea to add a new empty layer above the Background layer, so you can keep all the clone retouching on a separate layer. It was for this reason I chose to have the ‘All Layers’ Sample option selected so that all visible pixels were copied to this new layer.
2.
The Aligned box is normally checked by default in the Options bar. Here, I used the key to set the sample point on an undamaged part of the wooden door and clicked again further up the door to set the destination point. I then dragged to paint with the clone stamp. Photoshop retains the clone source/destination relationship for all subsequent brush strokes until a new source and destination are established.
All Layers option
The ‘Current & Below’ and ‘All Layers’ options are useful if you want to work with the clone stamp or healing brush and store your retouching on a separate layer. If you select the ‘Current & Below’ option, Photoshop only samples from the visible layers that are below the current layer and ignores any layers that are above it. If the ‘All Layers’ option is selected, Photoshop samples from all visible layers, including those above the active layer (see page 427).
3.
This screen shot shows how the door looked after I had worked on it a bit more using the clone stamp tool to mend the weathered portions of the woodwork. It is in situations like this that you may find the Clone Source panel overlay proves useful (see page 420).
Healing brush
The healing brush can be used in more or less the same way as the clone stamp tool to retouch small blemishes, although it is important to stress here that the healing brush is more than just a super clone stamp and has its own unique characteristics. These differences need to be taken into account so that you can learn when it is best to use the healing brush and when it is more appropriate to use the clone stamp.
To use the healing brush, you again need to establish a sample point by -clicking on the portion of the image you wish to sample from. You then release the key and move the cursor over to the point where you want to clone to and click or drag with the mouse to carry out the healing brush retouching. The healing brush performs its magic by sampling the texture from the source point and blends the sampled texture with the color and luminosity of the pixels that surround the destination point. The healing brush reads the pixels within a feathered radius that is up to 10% outside the perimeter of the healing brush cursor area. By reading the pixels that are outside the cursor area at the destination point, the healing brush is able (in most cases) to