Clone stamp is not just for cloning objects in photos, you can also “erase” them. Blemishes and wrinkles can be magically erased from your model’s faces as well as that annoying person who somehow made it in to your photo.

To start, select the clone stamp on your tool bar or press S on keyboard.

You will first need to pick a spot where you want Photoshop to copy/sample the information from than start painting over the area where you want the cloning to happen.

First hold Alt/Option to set a sampling point, this is the location you want to clone, than start painting as you would with a regular brush. Instead of solid paint coming out of the brush it is a identical spot where you first set your sampling point.

This is similar to using a lasso or any other selecting method and copy and pasting it to a different location.

The first 5 settings are the same as Brush tool, please read my post on brush settings

Brush – you can use any brush and brush dynamic for the Clone Stamp. Read my article on how to use Brush here.

Mode – the colors can be manipulated using any of the blending mode, although I do not advise using this. You will gain better control if you paint onto a blank layer than using the blending mode on the layer instead.

Opacity – Lets you choose the transparency of your stamp.

Flow – The value is how fast the paint will be applied, for best result use soft edged brush. You will see the paint builds up as the brush overlap previous paint.

Airbrush – this option will only work with brush with soft edge, it will gradually accumulate into a bigger blob if you hold your mouse in one area for too long similar to an airbrush.

Aligned – Once you start painting after you’ve set your reference point, the cloning will continue where you last left off every time you release your mouse until you set another anchor point. If aligned is off than once you release your mouse and tries to paint again, it will use the original reference point.

Example –

- Current layer, Clone tool will only be cloning whatever that is on the active layer.

- Current & Below, Clone tool will only clone whatever that is on the active layer plus whatever is visible under the active layer.

- All Layer, Clone tool will take all visible layer into account.

-

Include Adjustment Layer, this icon become available when you have an active adjustment layer turned on and Sample is set to anything other than Current Layer. When it is on, it will ignore all adjustment layer, and when it is off than what you see is what you will get.

Use the key “[“ and “]” on your keyboard to increase or decrease the size of your brush.

Best way to use clone tool is to paint it on a blank layer with the Sample set to Current & Below or All layer, that way you are not destroying the original.

There are many ways to “erase” an object in a photo rather than Clone stamp, what else can you use to achieve the same result?

This is part of my tutorial set. Please visit the TUTORIAL PAGE for a list of all the tutorials.

Rectangle and Oval Marquee tool is great for quick geometric selection for drawing shapes, creating boarders, outlining geometric object in a photo etc…

Hit M on keyboard to activate the Marquee tool, hold Shift + M to switch between Rectangle and Oval Marquee.

Click and drag to draw your marquee, do not worry if you can’t get the exact location the first time there are several tricks you can use to position your marquee.

The first set of icon is the add/subtract/intersect icons. You can also add selection by holding Shift while making another selection. You can subtract a selection by holding Alt/Option while making another selection. You can create intersection selection from two different selections by holding Shift+Alt/Option on the second selection.

Feathering will smooth out the edge for a softer more natural look

With the Anti-alias on, your selection will have a soft blur to create the illusion of smoother edge.

You can also create a fixed size or fixed ratio marquee.

Hold Shift for perfect square or circle instead of rectangle or oval shapes.

Hold Alt/Option while drawing a marquee, where you make the first click becomes the center of your shape instead of the corner.

You do not need to worry about aligning your marquee shape to your photo the moment you draw it. Go ahead and create the selection anywhere on the canvas and while your mouse is still held down, hold the SPACE button and you will be able to move the marquee around. After you release the Space button you can continue resizing the marquee.

You can also move the selection after you’ve released your mouse by simply clicking and dragging it.

Activate Move too (V) if you want to cut the content within the marquee tool, it will cut whatever that is in the layer and let you reposition it to another location of same layer.

Read my articles on Refine Edge to learn how to fine tune your selection after you are done with it. Read my article about Refine Edge here.

This is part of my tutorial set, please visit the tutorial page for a list of all the tutorials.

There is more to just making your photo smaller and trimming away unwanted edges to the Crop Tool. You can also add more pixel, align, match dimension of another file etc…

You can access the Crop Tool by using the shortcut C or go to the tool bar and click on the crop tool

The most common action is to crop out unwanted edges, drag from the upper left corner to the lower right corner. You still have a chance to make any final tweaking by moving the crop handles or clicking inside of the crop area and move it around. If you are satisfied with the crop, either double click inside the crop area or hit Enter. Pressing ESC key will cancel the crop operation.

You can also crop beyond your canvas thus adding more pixels to your file. First draw the crop mark anywhere and any size is fine, pull the handle and drag it outward beyond the canvas, when you hit enter you will notice new areas are added to your canvas.

Is your photo crooked? You can straighten the photo so that it is perfectly parallel with canvas or intentionally make a photo crooked by rotating the crop handles. Place your mouse near the out side of the crop mark, you will notice your mouse turns into a semi circle with arrow.

If you need to crop your photo down to a specific size you can set the Width and height in the crop menu.

You have the option to change the resolution by entering the new value in the resolution box. Leave it blank if you do not want the resolution to change.

To and resolution you can click on the file you want to reference from and click on the Front Image button. It will fill in the Width, Height and Resolution in the menu for you, now draw a crop mark on the file you want to match it to.

You do not need to use all three value once you click on the Front Image button, you can choose to keep just one or two of the value by deleting the rest of the values.

More option will appear once the crop is drawn.

You can choose to Delete or Hide the cropped area. If delete is selected anything that was cropped out will no long be available even if you have a layer. If you try to drag any layer you will notice that anything beyond the cropped area has been deleted as well. If hide is chosen, the information beyond the cropped mark will still be available for editing later.

Shield Color and Opacity will help cover up the potential area to be cropped out to help you better visualize what the final image will look like.

Perspective check box will allow you to distort the shape of the crop mark. This can help correct some minor distortion problem due to perspective. This is not available if fixed length is selected earlier.

You can also crop with any selection tool by making your selection first than go to Image-Crop. If your selection is not a rectangle than it will just take the very edge of your selections as the boundary of the crop.

Other tips..

Hold Ctrl/Command to temporary disable snapping.

Hold Shift to create a perfect square.

Holding Alt/Option will make let you draw the crop mark from inside out.

To keep the same aspect ratio, first draw a crop to fit the canvas, than hold Shift while cropping down to retain the ratio of your crop mark.

I hope this tutorial was useful, if you know of any other tricks related to crop please post that in my comment. Let me know which part of this tutorial you thought was the most useful.

This is part of my tutorial set. Please visit the TUTORIAL PAGE for a list of all the tutorials.

If you need to quickly select an area of similar color such as replacing the sky or a green screen Magic Wand is your tool.

Activate Magic Wand by hitting (W) key or select it from the tool box.

Magic wand works by selecting similar colors in your photo, so if you have a photo of  a model in front of a solid color background you can use magic wand to automatically select and delete the entire background. Of course you might not always have the luxury to use a nice clean background so here are some tools to make your life easier.

Above is the first half of the magic wand menu. If one click is not enough to cover your entire selection you can use the add (or hold Shift while selecting), subtract (or hold Alt/Option while selecting), or create intersection(or hold Alt/Option + Shift while selecting) icons to help you expand and perfect your selections.

Tolerance value determined how much similar color Photoshop should pick up. If the object you are trying to select is fairly evenly toned you will only need to low Tolerance value to work, but if your background is poorly lit and has too much variation, you might want to go with a higher value. The only problem with setting high Tolerance is that you might end up selecting colors you do not need so it might be better to set the Tolerance low and use the Add/Subtract function.

Anti-Alias, it will make the edge of your selection a bit softer to create the illusion that the edge is smoother.

Contiguous selection will only select area that are connected. See the example below, I tried to select the white background with Contiguous on, it does not select the white background isolated by the pink heel and the black heel. If I turn contiguous off, it now selects the isolated area but also everything else that looks like the white background such as the highlight area on the heel.

Turning Contiguous off might save you a few click but you will also risk selecting areas you do not need, you are better off leaving Contiguous on and use the Add/subtract selecting technique discussed earlier.

By default Sample All layers is turned off, magic wand will only work off of the active layer, even though you can see the layer below magic wand will still ignore it. Once Sample All Layers is turned on, magic wand sample everything that is currently visible.

In addition to Tolerance, you can also change how much color magic wand will consider as similar by changing the Eyedropper sample size.

Select Eyedropper tool (I), under the option bar, choose a bigger sample size.

A 31×31 average means it will look at the closest 31×31 pixel area and use the average value of that entire area instead of sampling one color pixel. It will be useful if the object has a lot of tone/value variation.

You can refine the selection by expanding, contracting or softening the edge and even automatically retrace the edges using the Refine Edge Tool. It is available in most selection tool such as lasso or marquee, you can also find it under the Menu Select-Refine Edge or with shortcut Alt/Option+Ctrl/Command+R. Read my article about Refine Edge here.

This is part of my tutorial set. Please visit the TUTORIAL PAGE for a list of all the tutorials.

Why use a Pen tool to draw or make selection? Because it gives you better control and higher precision that other tools cannot give you.  

Pen tool can be intimidating at first but once you learn it everything you touch with have a more professional look. You will get a clean and accurately outlined selection on all your photo. A pen path can also be saved within a .jpg file for use with other software!

Activate the Pen tool with the Tool Box or hit P on your keyboard.

Click and Drag to create your first point, you will see two Direction Handles once you start dragging, they control the curvature on either side of the control points, and this is NOT the actual path. Your path will appear once you make the second click.

Hold Alt/Option while you are dragging if you need a sharp corner, or go back to a previously created handle and hold the Alt/Option key(note that your mouse icon turn into a > shape) than drag the handle around, a sharp corner will be created.

If you’ve miss placed the anchor and need to move it around, Hold the Ctrl/Command key than drag an anchor point. Notice the mouse icon turns to a black triangle in the picture below.

Clicking anywhere on Line will add point; you will see a plus sign next to your pen icon.

Clicking on existing anchor point of delete it

Clicking the first anchor point again will close the curve, you will notice a circle appears next to your pen icon.

Holding Shift will snap to handle angle of 45 degrees angle

After you break the handle you can still have the handle on both side move relative to each other by holding Ctrl/command and alt/option at the same time.

Use Direction Selection Tool or A on your keyboard to select your path after you are done.

Ctrl/Command & Alt/Option click on the anchor point will reset the curve handles.

Types of Path – You can create Create Shape Layer (first Icon on top) or Path (second icon). If you set it to Shape Layer, you will be able to access the Shape through the layer pallet, you can change the color and opacity of this layer as you would with any layer items. If you set it to Path, you will need to look for it in the path pallet, you will be able to save your path in your .jpg and use it a selection to outline objects in your photo.

If you select Path option you can add Shape and subtract shape using these icons. The third icon is for intersection, so your second path need to intersect the first for this to work. Or you can exclude the intersection only with the last icon.

Softer selection, under the menu in path pallet, you can set feathering to soften the selection edge.

After you created your selection wit the Path tool you can use the Refine Edge tool to create a even more accurate selection. Read my article about Refine Edge here.

This is pretty much the basic of the Pen tool, if you have any other tips about the Path tool please share it with me in the comment, thanks!

This is part of my tutorial set. Please visit the TUTORIAL PAGE for a list of all the tutorials.