Learning Photoshop: Clone Tool

In a reprint of my collage (see Expectation & Aspiration below) on high quality photo paper, I reevaluated my design and realized some mistakes:

A horrible water line

Some floating bikini women who were messing up the perceived scale of the photo

A floating palm tree head.

Luckily, I have people around who are more expert at Photoshop than me, and they told me that all these problems could be fixed with one single, magical tool: the Clone Tool!

Which, to use, you simply select a brush size

hold the alt (Mac) or option (PC) key over the area you like and want to see more of, and then click over top of the area you want removed. It’s like a really fast and effective way of cutting out a selection and copying it over top of an unwanted image (which I have done ineffectively, before). It takes a little finesse, but magic:

The awkward line is pretty much gone! 

So is palm tree head!

And thank God, bikini women are gone too. 

Awkward evidence of clone tool is still there in most of them, but I think that as I keep practicing (and choosing less complex photos to manipulate), overall this will turn out to be a timesaver and lifesaver. Updated collage in the next post.