ScrapMentor - Scrapbooking 101

Week 16 - Computer

Back to Scrapbooking 101 Curriculum

Digital Touchups Part IV - Cloning

Have you ever ended up with pictures that were otherwise great, but were marred by some little imperfection? Maybe an ugly hose looped on the fence behind pictures of your kids cannonballing into the pool, or perhaps a bird that flitted into the frame behind your husband just before you took a picture of him sanding his boat. Sometimes, you can gently edit these little accidents out of your photos before they even get printed.

Let's start with an image you first saw in lesson 4. In that lesson, I showed you how you could use manual cropping to get rid of some of the ugly chain in the background, but we were left with some of it, nevertheless. Using the clone brush, you can eliminate it altogether.

The steps for using the Clone Brush are as follows:

1. Click the Clone Brush button.
2. Right-click on the picture where you want the cloning to begin. Our picture's background includes vertical stripes, so it's important to select a place directly above or below what you will start covering.
3. Click the area you wish to cover, holding down the left mouse button as you apply the cloning. You will see an X appear on the photograph that shows you where the clone positioner is. The clone brush will copy pixels from the area of the X and apply them to wherever your mouse pointer is. The X will also track along with you as you move your mouse around - as you move left, the X moves left - so it might be necessary to occasionally re-set the clone pointer's location.

Once you have finished applying your clone changes, save the new photograph as a separate file. Keep in mind that this is not a cure-all for every bad picture you might take, and it works better on unpatterned backgrounds than on patterned ones. Even so, it can be very useful for getting pictures from "almost there" to "there."

Congratulations - you're all done!

Homework

Get cloning! Practice using Paint Shop Pro's clone brush to remove background imperfections.

Supplemental Reading

• Creating Keepsakes - Mar 03 - pp. 51-53 - "3 Custom Photo Looks"
• Memory Makers - Jul 05 - pp. 87-96 - "Bright Ideas for Bad Photos Part 2"
• Memory Makers - Sep 05 - pp. 75-84 - "Bright Ideas for Bad Photos Part 3"
• Scrapbooks Etc. Dec 04 - pp. 90-99 - "Digital Photo Magic"
• Scrapbooks Etc. Feb/Mar 06 - pp. 101-106 - "Photo Rx"

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