Photoshop Clone Stamp Tool

Clone Stamp Tool (shortcut S) is one of the most important tools of Adobe Photoshop. In fact this tool gave me inspiration to use photoshop over and over again. It lets you duplicate a portion of an image to an area of the image itself or some other image. To be able to perform Clone Stamp from one image to other their color modes must be the same. The Pattern Stamp Tool is a different thing.

As I already said, Cloning an area involves two steps.

1. Defining the source point.
2. Painting the source on the destination.

Let's do this practically, save this image and open it up in Photoshop.

Nice image, isn't it? So er... what are we gonna do? Let's clone a penguin. Let's clone the second penguin at the bottom. First let's define the source. Select the Clone Stamp Tool (S). Now press Alt key and see the cursor change from to . The second cursor is active when defining the source (ie when pressing Alt) and the first one is when painting the source. So now zoom in the image and define the source in the penguin's tail. Press Alt and move the cursor to the desired area and Left Click (ie define a source by Alt+Click) See below:

Now that the source is defined, let's paint somewhere above the path on which the penguins are moving. Let's first duplicate the current layer (you'll know why later). Layer >> Duplicate Layer... Give the new layer name as Penguins. With the Clone Stamp Tool selected, right click anywhere on the image and select Brush Diameter of 20 px and Hardness of 20 % (try with different hardness values to see the difference) start painting from an area where the tail of the new penguin would have been if it was really there. Confusing? See below:

Don't worry if the edges of the penguin exceeds it's skin. We're working on a duplicated layer, we can delete unnecessary areas. Note a ' + ' cursor moving in the source areas while you paint on the destination areas. It helps to decide which area to clone and which not to. If you're done, the result should look like below:

To remove the unwanted edges of the penguin we used the Eraser Tool Select the Eraser Tool (press E). Now erase on the edges, when you erase, you erase "this" layer, so the layer behind this will appear which is what we want. It's hard to explain, give it a go. (erase with a hardness value of 50%)

If you mis-paint anywhere, feel free to Undo (Ctrl+Z) or Step Backwards (Ctrl+Alt+Z). My final result is as follows:

I'll be using the Clone Stamp tool in many advanced tutorials. The more you clone the more you learn. Keep doing it untill you master it.