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.

Photoshop Type Tool

Photoshop Type Tool (shortcut T) is the how everybody create smooth text graphics. Adding texts in images is a Must Learn thing for all Photoshop Users. There's no limitation to the amount of text you type, just play around with this tool and you'll learn it better.

Press T on your keyboard to select the Type Tool and right click on it as shown below:

As you can see there are different Type Tools avilable. I guess the first two are self-explaining. I'll start with Horizontal Type Tool. Create a new document in Photoshop. File >> New, Width: 800, Height: 600 (pixel) and Pres Ok. Press D on your keyboard to set the Color Palette to default (black/white) color. Now with the Type Tool selected click anywhere on the new document.

Now type in a text. I'll type Adobe Photoshop Type Tool. It'll look like this.

Look at the Type Tool Options Box:

The font I've selected is Arial, you can try any other font. The font styles avilable for this font are Regular, Bold, Italic and Bold Italic. Font Size is 36 pt. There are four anti-aliasing options for texts in Photoshop. They are Sharp, Crisp, Strong, Smooth. Let's select Smooth this time. The three buttons after anti-aliasing are Allignment buttons. If you use Microsoft Word or any other text editor, you must know these allignment options. Then there is Font Color. Let's select a blue color for our text. For all the text to change their color, you need to select all of them. Press Ctrl+A to select the text and click on the Black Box to change the color. Then press the Enter key on the Number Pad side of your keyboard. The main Enter key is used to give a line feed while typing. Here's what I've done

For the exact same color, go to the color dialog box like you did by clicking on the black box and give 008aff as input in a text box besides a # symbol. These are color codes, each code is for a specific color. See below:

Play around with the colors. You can give seperate colors to each letter of the text. Do some coloring to endup with something like this.

I'm sure you can get results better than that. The next button in the options box is Create Wrapped Text . With the type tool selected, click on this tool and a dialog box will be displayed. I've typed in "PicFix - The Photoshop Blog" as my text. From the new dialog box that appeared, click on the Style drop down menu, and select one from the menu. I did a Bulge with the following settings:

and I and ended up like this:

Keyboard shortcuts don't work while you're typing because Photoshop thinks the input is a text to be typed in not the shortcut. To end typing don't press the Return (enter) key. This will give a line feed while you're typing and you type from a new line. Instead press the Enter key on the NumPad of your keyboard. This will exit type mode. If the Numpad is not avilable then just select any other Photoshop Tool from the tool box and you exit the type mode.

Vertical Type Tool is similar, try it yourself. The difference is that the text is typed vertically in this case. I'll explain about the Type Mask Tools later in Layers section.

Get your hand around with the type tool. It's very important to get used to this tool as you'll need it in majority of image editing. Here's a simple and quick tutorial to Add text in an Image. I hope you'll get used to the type tool quicker than I did.

Photoshop Crop Tool

Crop Tool (shortcut C) is used to select an area in an image and discard the rest of the area of the image. This is useful in cases where you just want to focus or save the desired area of an image ie remove the unnecessary portions. An example is shown below.

Let's remove the man and save only the cute baby. Select Crop Tool in the tool box (C). Now drag a rectangle defining the baby and release the mouse button. See below

You can move this selection area before cropping. Now press Enter. The result is the image is reduced to only the baby in the frame. Be cautious while cropping because after this the lost area cannot be recovered later when reopening the image after saving it. The cropped output of the above image is as follows

He's a cute, isn't he? So is this tool. There are options for Crop Tools too. With Crop Tool selected, look at the options pane.

On the left hand side you can see Crop Presets. These are the size of the documents after cropping, you can also define your own size in the empty boxes (width: height: ). In my opinion these are of no use. I'll discuss Resizing an image in details later. Crop Tool possesses another options box too. When the desired area is selected then the options pane turns to another box as shown below:

By default Shield is applied with a dark color. When Shield is turned off, the color and contrast of area to be saved and area to be discarded are same. With Shield feature turned on, the color (black here) indicates the color to show for the area to be discarded. Opacity defines the visibility of the image to be discarded. Try changing these values yourself. It has got nothing to do with the cropping feature. I may not have written about this, just wanted you to know.

Crop Tool can be alternatively used by combining it with Marquee Tool. I prefer doing this. Simply marquee select the desired area and go to the menu Image >> Crop and we're done cropping. Elliptical Marquee as well as Lasso Tools can also be used to define the areas but the results will be the same because in Photoshop the cropped area is always a rectanglular one. Try this and you'll understand what I'm saying.

Photoshop Magic Wand Tool

Magic Wand Tool (shortcut W ) is used to make selection on the image. Unlike Marquee Tool and Lasso Tool where we dragged and drew the selection lines, in Magic Wand Tool we just click the selection and the selected area is based on the tolerance value given. Technically speaking, magic wand tool selects the area covered by a color where the click is made. The decision of which color to include and which to exclude depends upon the tolerance value assigned before clicking. Lets do it practically. Save the image below and fire it up in Photoshop.

With Magic Wand Tool selected (press W) give a Tolerance value of 50 in the Options Box. Make sure that the Anti-alias option is checked on. Now click anywhere on the sky of the image. If everything's right, the result should be like the one below:

So you can see the marching ants around the required selection area. Did you notice we missed an area between the man's legs? let's select that too. If you've read the Marquee Tool's "Add to Selection" option, you'd do this in a snap, if not, with the Magic Wand Tool selected, press shift key and click on the area between his legs.

Now we've selected the sky which is in background of the man standing. Let's do something interesting. With the area selected, go to Select >> Feather (shortcut Alt+Ctrl+D) and give a feather value of 2. Click on Brush Tool (shortcut B) and select some color in the color box's foreground stack. It's black by default, click on it to chose colur. I picked up something orangy.

Now paint with the brush tool (B) and don't worry while painting as only the selected area will be painted. Don't leave any area unpainted like I did below.

Now we'll paint the floor, with the magic wand tool selected click on the floor (don't shift + click since we only need the floor now) When it's selected give the feather value 2 like you did earlier. Now again select a color, I chose blue. Paint it on the selected floor area. Press Ctrl+D My final output is as follows:

Notice the 4 buttons in the Options Bar when Magic Wand Tool is selected. They are New Selection, Add to Selection, Subtract from Selection and Intersect with Selection. I explained their usage in Marquee Tools page. So this is how and why the Magic Wand Tool is used.

Photoshop Move Tool

The Move tool (shortcut M) is used to move the selected area of an image or the image (layer) itself unlike moving the selection which we did in Marquee tools > Moving the selection. This is best explained practiaclly.

Lets select the left eye of this cute model. We'll use Elliptical Marquee Tool.

Now making sure that the Move Tool (shortcut V) is selected on the tool box (the cursor should be an arrow with a scissor), drag the selected elliptical area to another region. (shortcut Ctrl + drag when any other tool is selected). To perform perfect horizontal or vertical move, click shift, so that makes it Ctrl + Shift + drag.

Voila!! the eye is shifted to the cheek of the girl. Notice the white region left behind in the eye. It is white because the background color currently assigned is white (and the foreground is black, look below).

You might be wondering to move the eye, keeping the original eye in its own place, in other words "Duplicating" the eye. This can be done by clicking Alt key while you drag. Notice the move cursor change to duplicate cursor when you press Alt. See below:

To finish the move process, press Ctrl+D and you're done with a girl having three eyes, one on her cheek .

You can use Keyboard arrow keys to move more precisely to any direction you want, hold shift key to move in larger scale. Pressing Alt key works in this method too. Give it a try.

To learn more about moving with smooth edges go to this tutorial > Edge Feather.

Photoshop Lasso Tool

Lasso tools (shortcut L) are similar to Marquee Tools, the difference is, lasso tools are manual. I'll explain the three lasso options avilable in Photoshop.

Lasso Tool

This is just like drawing a selection area in the image. The shape may be any as you're free to draw the selection line. See below for details (save the image and fire up photoshop)

Ok, I assume you've turned on Photoshop and opend the above pic (tip: you can just drag this pic from here to your photoshop window)

Let's throw some Lasso in the above pic. Select the Lasso tool . Feel free and draw a graph with this tool and realize that you're actually drawing a selection. When you close a loop in the end and release the Left Mouse button, you can see marching ants around your selection ie the area is selected.

In the above pic I've just started drawing the selection with Lasso Tool.

The ways of ending the selection are either you close the loop or release the left mouse button wherever you are. Compare the results yourself.

I guess you now know the difference between Marquee Tool and Lasso Tool. The lasso helps to make selection how we want it. There are two other lasso tools which are explained below.

Polygonal Lasso Tool

This is similar to lasso tool we observed above. The difference is it is used to draw perfect polygonal selection with the help of straight lines. Unlike lasso tool, this is started with left clicking on the starting point (don't drag). Then point to the next spot where you want to end the straight line. Select something like shown below:

Notice the Polygonal Lasso cursor has a small circle besides it when you're about to end the loop. Another way of ending the selection is double click wherever you've reached, a straight line will be drawn from this point to the starting point in this case. Note: if you need to get back to the previous state (ie if you plot a wrong point), just press Delete key. Try doing this.

Magnetic Lasso Tool

This one's an interesting tool. I'm sure you'll know yourself when you use this for the first time. It is used for the well defined edges in an image. An example is the image we're currently working. See the blue shape of the parachute. It's so well defined that we can use this automated Photoshop tool do our work. Our objective is to select the blue parachute only. Let's use the magnetic lasso tool then. Start off from a point on the edge of the blue thing.

After the initial point is clicked you don't need to click now, just move your mouse towards the right of the image. To be precise move the mouse along the edge of the parachute and move slowly, in this way the selection will be smooth.

(i don't know why the magnetic lasso cursor is not shown by print screen)

When you're moving the mouse, if the tool automatically doesn't select the points, just move your mouse a bit (up n down) on the edge till it does assign another point. Still if it doesn't left click to assign a point manually and move further. Manual clicking is required especially in corners where the tool needs to turn around, see below:

So you need to be slow and steady in corners when turning the direction. Go ahead and do your thing untill you get something like this:

If you plotted a wrong point or if the tool itself assigned the wrong point, step backwards by pressing Delete key. If you need to end the selection without completing the loop, double click wherever you are. Try the Magic Wand Tool, it's similar to Magnetic Lasso.

You might want to get around with Magnetic Lasso's Option pane. This can be useful

Width box indicates the number of pixels the magnetic lasso tool uses to find the edge. An increased value of Edge Contrast helps to select the edge more precisely, try giving 75% of it. Frequency is the number of points the tool assigns while moving the mouse. It ranges from 1 to 100. Try changing all the options avilable and compare the results.

A few things which i may have missed out:

• Lasso tool options are avilable similar to Marquee Options, see the options pane. You can also Feather the lasso selection.
• Holding shift key while drawing with polygonal lasso tool helps to draw perfect 45o lines which can be used to draw shapes like diamond, triangles etc.

So you've learned the three ways of manually selecting desired area in an image. There are a lot of use of all the three tools. Out of context, I'll tell you what you can do with the selection you just made with magnetic lasso tool. I assume you've made the selection like the one below:

Now press Ctrl + Shift + U to desaturate the selection. Desaturating means making the selection out of colours, in other words Black & White. If you can see the blue colour has gone, with the parachute area still selected go to Image >> Adjustments >> Color Balance (Ctrl + B). Make the following settings by either dragging the color bars or entering the numbers approximately same as these, you can try with your own colors. Make sure "Midtone" is selected in Tone balance section of the dialog box below

When you're done press Ok. The B/W (originaly blue) area has turned to Green. Press Ctrl+D. This removes the marching ants visible when the area is under selection. I hope you have the following result now.

This thing I just explained is not related to Lasso tool, I just did it for your refreshment. It is just an example out of many other things you can do after you make the required selection.