The Clone Stamp tool is one such feature of Photoshop, and it is a great little apparatus for sorting out an array of problems with your images. Let’s delve into how you use Photoshop’s Clone Stamp tool.
What Is Photoshop’s Clone Stamp Tool?
Really, the clue is in the name with this one. The Clone Stamp tool takes a copy of an image over a defined radius as a circular snippet (the clone). You can then overlay the snippet on top of other parts of your image using the same defined radius (the stamp).
It is great for clearing up blemishes on an image and, because you can Clone Stamp as little as one pixel (up to 5,000 pixels), it allows incredibly detailed touching up of your rasters.
Not only that, but if you have minor elements you’d like to add more of, it works perfectly here too, again offering highly detailed one pixel (up to 5,000 pixels) editing.
So, it is excellent for repairing and retouching your images, while also having a few other purposes, such as with timeline animation production and editing. For this guide, let’s see how to use it just to retouch an image.
How to Use Photoshop’s Clone Stamp
So, assuming you have launched Photoshop and imported your image, let’s look at how you use the Clone Stamp tool.
As you can see, I have imported an image of a rather impressive pebble tower I built at the beach recently. As you can also see, the cooler bag in the background ruins the entire image.
I want to get rid of it and, to do so, I am going to use the Clone Stamp tool. This will involve using some larger Clone Stamps along with some smaller ones to resolve any edge details around that top stone, with the cooler bag strap.
Now, select the Clone Stamp from your Tools bar, which is on the left of the screen by default (when you open an image in Photoshop). If you can’t see your Tools bar, go to Window > Show Tools. Clone Stamp will be the 10th icon down the Tools bar, assuming you haven’t customized your Tools.
Now, you will notice that the options for Clone Stamp have appeared at the top of the screen. Because the cooler bag is a fairly substantial part of the image, I can use a larger Clone Stamp tool to get rid of most of it.
From the Brush Options dropdown, I have selected a Size of 300 pixels for my brush. The dimensions of the image are 2736 x 3648 pixels, so it makes sense to choose a larger brush size to remove a significant portion of the cooler bag quickly.
Because this image has a bokeh effect, I must be careful to match the blur as closely as possible (although in reality, you could also use the Blur tool to hide any sloppy Clone Stamping).
Hover your newly created brush over the image and you’ll be able to select whatever you want your clone to be. Press Alt + Click (Windows) or Option + Click (Mac). This selects your clone, which you can see if you drag the mouse around the screen.
You can then stamp your clones where they need to be. It doesn’t need to be massively tidy at this point. We just want coverage. Be careful not to stamp images that don’t match the current image (unless that is your intention, of course).
For example, for this image, we would avoid cloning the gray pebble at the top and stamping it over the background pebbles. That would look wrong, so try to stamp like-for-like when retouching images.
If you are noticing the edges of your stamp (i.e. you can see the perimeter of the circle you are stamping) then you can reduce the Hardness of the brush in the Brush Options menu. For this particular image, somewhere between 40 to 50 hardness works well.
The hardness of the brush determines how well-defined the edges of your stamp will be. It will take a bit of practice before you can tell which brush size and hardness to use; because of the bokeh effect, I needed to use a softer brush, hence reducing the hardness to 40, for fairly soft edges.
As you can see, I have used a brush size of 300 pixels with a hardness of 40 to cover up the cooler bag completely. However, we’re not quite finished yet. I need to fine-tune the area around the right-hand side of the rock at the top.
For this, I used a smaller brush of 50 pixels and kept the hardness at 40. I also zoomed in to the area I wanted to retouch to ensure I’m stamping accurately.
Now that I have removed the remnants of the cooler bag that sat around the edge of the pebble, I can zoom back out and assess whether I’m happy with the image.
This is an important step. It allows you to see whether the stamped area looks sympathetic to the rest of the image. If it doesn’t look quite right, then you can add more stamps of various sizes to make it look more natural.
And there we have it! This is how you successfully retouch an image using the Photoshop Clone Stamp tool. All traces of the unsightly cooler bag are no longer existent, and the image is ready to share on social media.
Once you are happy with your image retouching, you can go to File > Export > Export As and save your Photoshop image as a PNG or a JPEG file. Now you can share it or print it!
Now You Know How to Use the Clone Stamp Tool in Photoshop
The Clone Stamp is an excellent tool to get rid of blemishes or copy image elements quickly and effectively. You don’t have to use it for retouching—you can even use it to add some special effects to your image, such as creating a ghostly image of yourself in the background of a picture.
However, now you can make your images look more professional by removing elements you don’t want using the Clone Stamp tool.
