Mastering the Clone Stamp Tool in Photoshop: Adding to Your Image

In this video we'll be using the clone stamp tool to begin adding to our image where the transparency is. Therefore with our Telluride panorama photoshop file open, let's begin working.

The first thing that we'll want to do is we'll want to make a copy of our panorama so we can protect the original. The easiest way to do this is to grab the entire panorama group and we'll drag it into new layer and we'll see that we have a panorama copy. Let's then lock our original panorama and we'll retitle it panorama original and hit ENTER.

Next, in order to use the clone stamp tool on this panorama made up of multiple images, what we want to do is actually merge all the images into one layer. The easiest way to do that is to right click on panorama copy and click merge group. We can now see that we only have one layer that has been merged of all of these photos.

While this is helpful because then we can simply work with one layer, keep in mind that this is a destructive change therefore we won't be able to go back and release all of those photos into different layers. That's why we want to have our panorama original folder with all of them. Next, let's toggle the visibility for our panorama original so that we can begin working.

The first thing that we'll want to do for our image is crop it down. We don't need to fill in the entire area around this image, therefore we can crop it down a little bit and save ourselves some of the fill work. We'll go to our crop tool found in the tools bar and simply click and drag in and let's crop to about there and hit ENTER.

Let's use CTRL S on the keyboard to save our work thus far and let's zoom in to the bottom right so we can begin working. I'll use CTRL on my keyboard and scroll down to move to the right. Next, let's select the clone stamp tool.

The healing brush tool in that we can select where the pixels are coming from, however it allows us to stamp and fill in part of our image by pulling specifically from other parts of the image. Therefore, let's zoom in a little bit closer and begin working on these trees down here. If we click we'll see a dialog box comes up telling us that ALT hasn't been selected and thus we haven't selected where the pixels are coming from.

We'll click OK and next hold ALT on the keyboard until we see this target as our cursor and if we're going to fill in right down here let's pick from some of the trees and greenery right above it and using ALT to click we'll now see that our cursor shows a preview of if we click what we're going to see. I'll simply click and drag around and we'll see that we begin filling in some of these transparent layers. The clone stamp tool can be pretty effective when we're using it to add texture such as this and the actual pixels aren't very important.

Let's use ALT again to select over here and begin adding in pixels. You'll see that if we select something other than the texture we want to add such as this rock up here and begin trying to draw it'll simply copy the pixels from above and give us a very different image. Thus it's important to try and match what you're filling with the ALT.

I'll use CTRL Z on the keyboard and now for this section here we're going to try and pull pixels from right above where it turns from the lighter green into some of the other vegetation. I'll hold ALT and click and just start to make lines. As you can see there's a target right where it's pulling the pixels from currently to the top left of my cursor and this helps us see where we're pulling these pixels from.

I'm going to keep dragging here and keep switching up where I'm pulling pixels from and you can see we fill that in pretty naturally. Next let's work on this corner here. If we hold ALT and select where we're pulling pixels from we can simply start dragging over.

You will notice however if you keep dragging to the bottom we see that we don't have any pixels dragged. That's because it's actually pulling from what was previously there. So because that's where we started drawing up here it won't pull the pixels we've recently drawn while the mouse has been clicked.

All you have to do is release the mouse, click ALT to again select where you want to pull pixels from, and drag over. Using the clone tool effectively often means that you have to drag from multiple sources so that it's not too obvious that you're recreating the same pixels from another part of the image. One thing you will notice in using the clone tool is that sometimes your image if you drag too much from the same place will look the same.

Therefore this brown section right here looks exactly like this brown section here. Easiest way to fix that is again hit ALT and let's cover that up with a different texture. Therefore this looks completely different.

We'll do the same thing over here using ALT and removing that lighter green here and finally right here using ALT to remove that tree. This will just simply keep working along the border pulling in from multiple sources to give it a unique look. Let's hit CTRL S on our keyboard to save the work so far and in the next video we'll be finishing up this photo with the clone stamp tool.

See you there!