Mastering the Clone tool

One of the most useful tools in the digital photographer's toolbox is the Clone tool - it's also known as the Rubber Stamp or Clone Stamp. This particular tool is responsible for many photographers taking up digital imaging, because the results it can produce, in the right hands, will make your jaw drop. The first time you see bits of clutter being erased from an image, spots and blemishes being removed from your partner’s face or items moved and repositioned, you’ll be in awe.

In simple terms all that happens is the Clone Stamp tool picks up, or samples, pixels from one place and drops them somewhere else. It’s one of the most used devices to remove or add detail to a digital image.

I've chosen what to many would be a fairly tricky image to work on, but with the right knowledge you'll see how easy it actually is. It's a shot of a sheep behind a barbed wire fence. You may have a similar shot taken at a zoo of a caged animal or a stunning piece of architecture hidden behind scaffolding, or even a famous tourist spot cluttered with people.

Follow these steps on your own picture and you'll be surprised how easy it is to tidy up a messy photo. I'm using Photoshop but the tool works the same way in many other programs.

We'll take the top left first. You may think intrusions in areas of sky would be easy to clone, but that’s not always the case. As tones subtly change you could easily end up with an obvious line.

To illustrate this I first sampled using a hard edged brush from the point at the end of the arrow (left). I then took a sample from the same point, but used a soft brush (middle). The blend is now better, but the tone is still different. The third version is the best (right) and shows you need to sample from an area as close to the area that you're cloning over as possible.

Can you spot any difference between the left and right shots? Look at the pattern in the sheep’s wool in the area circled. It’s repeated in the left shot. In the right version I sampled from a different place.

In this example you have to look hard to spot it, but that could have been a real obvious cloning error on some images.

When cloning fine detail look around for similar areas and try and follow a path that will make the sample look natural. To show you the route to take look at the areas under the arrow shaft in the photo on the right. These are where the sample points are made and the direction of the arrow is the direction I followed. You will see I was looking to extend branches or patches of sky over the wire where appropriate.