Thursday, November 22, 2012

Cloning away the unwanted

Clone Tool is an unlikely name for a photo retouching tool, but it is the best way to remove blemishes of unwanted detail from a photo. It works by letting you pick up the another part of the picture andexample of the photo-paint clone tool paste it into a different location (usually via a fixed offset. Most decent photo editors (I exclude phone apps which don’t routinely have an equivalent to a clone tool) will have clone tools (it may sometimes be called retouch, blemish removal or even a rubber stamp) and it is probably one tool you should learn to use, but with restraint. The basic operation is to select the clone tool, pick the point you want copied and the select the area you want it copied to  You can the generally move the paste point and the copy point will follow, click the mouse and paste tis new image will be copied. Its quiet natural once you get the hang of it, However if you are copying a lot of textured background you can end up with obvious repeating patterns if you are not careful so it pays to alter the relationship between your source and destination points from time to time and perhaps even the size to the section being copied. In this case I have used the clone tool in Corel photo-paint because I can control the size and type of brush How you set the source area, destination,etc varies a lot in the software so you will need to read the help, or the manual and practice a little. That skill can come in very handy from time to time, like now for me I like the photo of the bush turkey but not the wire fence.
now you see it  now you don't
A couple of minutes of cloning and the fence has gone. A little tweak of clarity and vibrance to 'lift" the final image.

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