CLONING and SMUDGING Often it's necessary to remove something from a photograph. It might be an object that you didn't want to be in the picture, a person you'd like to take out, or it might be a rip or scratch in a photo that you would like to repair. To illustrate this we have an old photograph that has rips in it. After scanning the photo into the computer, our goal is to remove the rips and other damage, and be left with a restored photo we can print. You might think that you can just smudge away the rips, using the smudge tool. However, if the background is patterned, this won't work ... the smudge tool just pushes around a solid colour. Look at the example at the right and you'll see that smudging over the rip leaves behind an obvious blurry area. This won't do. What we want to do is to copy a little of the background pattern near the rip, and paste it over top of the rip. You could do this by repeated copying of little bits and pasting, but there's a tool in Photoshop that will do it for you ... it's called the Clone Stamp Tool. The Clone Stamp Tool is found in the Tools menu, as illustrated on the left. Once you've selected this tool, the program waits for you to select an area to clone, or copy. You do this by positioning your cursor obver a bit of background that you'd like to copy, near the rip. At that point, hold down the 'Alt' key, and click your mouse. You'll see the cursor change to a 'bull's eye', as shown at the right. Have a look at this tool's properties along the bar at the top. You'll see something like this: You want the sampled background (under the bull's eye) to be fairly small; that's the size (9 pixels, here). You also want the mode to be normal and the opacity 100%. Make sure 'aligned' is checked. Now position your mouse cursor over the rip ... the part of the picture you want to disappear. Click once, and the background is copied over top of the rip, making it disappear. (picture at left below) You will have to do this many times, continually resampling near the rip (alt-click) until the rip is entirely covered. (At the right, the result of one sample click) Sometimes a paste won't look right; undo it and resample nearer the rip. Experiment with different sizes (smaller or larger than 9 pixels). You may need to do some smudging as well, after the cloning has been done. Below you can see how to access the smudging tool. If you follow the arrows you can see the settings we used. You want a fairly small brush (we used 13 pixels) and a strength of about 75%. Rubbing the image back and forth near the pasted background will smooth it out. Make sure you don't see a big blur when you've finished; adjust the settings if you do. So that you can see the effectiveness of the clone stamp tool, combined with a little smudging, we actually restored the photo sample used above. The original image after scanning is below, on the left.; it is ripped in several places, has ragged edges, and is quite faded. On the right is the final image after using the clone stamp tool, doing a little smudging, cropping the edges, and increasing the contrast. (Contrast is in the Enhance menu).   This photo is ready to print! You might also want to experiment with another tool that can be used to remove small unwanted items. The Spot Heal tool is particularly handy for removing dust spots, small scratches and other imperfections (including pimples). Like the Clone Stamp tool, it copies the nearby background onto the spot you click on. Just select the tool and click on the imperfection you want to remove. Using Photoshop Computers | Science & Math | Worsley School