Software : Tutorial: How to use the Photoshop clone tool |
| Tutorial: How to use the Photoshop clone tool Posted: 28 May 2011 02:00 AM PDT  Almost since the concept of composition was first introduced, photographers have found all kinds of ways to get it wrong. Lamp posts growing out of people's heads, dust spots on film, and people's legs walking into or out of a frame can all conspire to ruin an otherwise great shot. Luckily, the ability to remove these objects from photos is almost as old as the medium itself, and as is the case with most aspects of photography, the digital practice is unbelievably easy. It's known as cloning, because you're copying and pasting an area of your photograph over the top of another, effectively deleting an object from a photo. The uses are myriad. Have you ever taken an otherwise perfect landscape photo with an articulated lorry on a distant road? Cloning can remove it. Is there another photographer in the background ruining your shot of a zoo animal? A quick wave of the cloning tool can make it look as if you were the only one there. Cloning needs to be done with finesse, though. Although recent versions of popular editing software like Photoshop Elements and GIMP have made cloning easier, it's increasingly tempting to reach for the clone tool at the drop of a hat, when what you actually need is the lightest of touches. Read on the find out how to make distracting elements of your shots invisible, invisibly. Choosing your shot As with most photo-editing techniques, you shouldn't view the clone tool as a magical implement that can clear up even the most cluttered backgrounds. For example, you need to remember that any object you remove has to be replaced with nearby detail. The sharper that detail is, the harder it will be to invisibly transplant over the top of an unwanted object. You may find that removing a significantly sized feature - a person standing in front of a church, for example - may be impossible without making it obvious that you've been tinkering. Also remember that if there's lots of detail behind the object you're getting rid of, you'll effectively have to re-draw that hidden detail by hand - a stern test of your artistic abilities.
CHOOSE WISELY: Although the cars ruin this image, removing them with a clone brush is impossible - the parts to be removed outweigh the usable bits of the photo Instead, the clone tool is best used to correct images that only need relatively small objects and features removed to perfect them - the larger the object, the more work you'll be making for yourself. The clone tool The clone tool is only available in relatively heavy-duty editing software. This isn't, for example, something you can do with free software like Picnik, the online photo editor, or even the often surprisingly powerful Google Picasa. Instead, you'll need what's known as a per-pixel image editor. Some editors, including earlier versions of Lightroom and Picasa, only let you make wholesale changes to your images, rather than giving you the ability to edit highly specific bits of them. You need to be extremely precise when using the clone tool - you don't necessarily need to be able to zoom your image to 100 per cent and work on individual pixels, but you still need a piece of software that will give you a reasonable amount of flexibility and power. Pick your software There are several options to consider. If you haven't already committed to a piece of software, we continue to recommend Adobe's Photoshop Elements 9 (£60), which offers a good blend of editing power and library tools. Don't worry if you've spent money elsewhere, though - the likes of PaintShop Pro (£44) and Serif's PhotoPlus X4 (£60) also offer cloning. Alternatively, if you'd rather save some cash, GIMP is open source, totally free and very powerful, as long as you can put up with what we'll call 'usability quirks'. When you use the clone brush, you'll be working at very close quarters with your image, which makes it easy to lose track of precisely what you're doing, or what your efforts will look like once you're done. With that in mind, it's important to constantly check your work by zooming out of your image and making sure that the cloning you're doing is going to end up being invisible. Once you've got the hang of the clone brush, there are a few tips that will speed you along and reduce the chance of you making any serious mistakes. Firstly, remember that [Ctrl]+[Z] (the Undo command) is your friend. If you make a clumsy brushstroke, always use Undo rather than trying to correct your mistake by ploughing on. You can ensure your final image's quality is as good as possible by opening the original, then saving it as a lossless format, like TIF or PSD. Saving a JPG multiple times results in a loss of image quality - bad news, since you'll want to save your progress frequently when working on an image to minimise the loss if your software crashes. Working on a lossless copy also guarantees that no matter how big a mess you make, your original file will remain safe. How it works At its heart, the clone brush is fairly simple. To begin, you assign a point from which the brush should copy. When you click and drag the brush, the area you pre-selected is copied and pasted over the top of the other area. It's like selecting an area of your image and dragging it over the part you want to remove. However, there's a huge amount of flexibility, which gives the clone brush its power. The ability to change brush sizes from very small to very large means you can work on all manner of objects, from telegraph wires to people. You can also "feather" the clone brush - that is, soften the brush's edge to make it less obvious that you've worked on your image. There are pitfalls to beware of when you're using the clone tool. Making multiple brushstrokes - particularly when you're sampling from the same place with every click of the mouse - is a sure way to introduce a new and obviously fake texture into your image. This is because you're essentially copying and pasting the same small area of the image again and again. Follow the walkthrough below to find out how to get a smooth, unnoticeable effect. Use the clone brush to remove distractions from your photos 1. Select the Clone Stamp tool
This image of a pair of deer locking antlers is perfectly focused, well exposed and shows a great bit of natural behaviour. If only it weren't for the jarring passers-by in the background. With the image converted to PSD format, select the Clone Stamp tool by pressing [S]. The square bracket keys are also handy for getting the brush size right without moving the mouse pointer. 2. Get a closer look
Now we'll use the [Z] key to select the Magnifying Glass tool, and click to drag it around the main areas we want to clone. You can zoom back out of your image using [Ctrl]+[0]. Alternatively, [Ctrl] and the [+] or [-] symbols will progressively zoom into or out of your shot. You should check that your work is effective - and difficult to spot - at every step, as mistakes caught early are easiest to fix. 3. Align your stamp
There are a few options on the Clone Stamp toolbar. The one to keep an eye on now is the 'Aligned' option. If the box is checked, your selected clone point will change relative to the position of the mouse pointer when you begin your brush stroke. If it's clear, the place you choose to clone from will remain in the same place. Your choice here will depend on the job at hand; for now we'll select 'Aligned'. 4. Resize the cursor
Press [Alt] and the cursor will change into a crosshair - clicking on your image will determine which part of the shot is cloned. In this case we want to clone the blurred greenery over the top of the person. The next step is choosing the right cursor size - we'll go for something around two-thirds the width of the object we're painting over, which gives a good balance between speed and accuracy. 5. Start cloning
Removing objects is as easy as clicking and dragging over the object to remove - the clone stamp will recreate detail from your chosen area. A steady hand and attention to detail will go a long way here - check your work after every stage to make sure you haven't inadvertently created a new feature that looks even worse than before. For fiddly bits, stop work and reduce the size of the cursor for more precision. 6. More challenging shots
This was a fairly simple case - the background we were using was out of focus, so there was no need to be particularly careful about which bits we used as clone points. If the background had been in focus, it would have been important to make sure we weren't replicating big areas of detail. The basics are the same - just be prepared to spend more time if you're handling more detailed images. |
| In Depth: 10 best iPad and iPhone news apps Posted: 27 May 2011 02:39 AM PDT  The iPad is a news junkie's dream. With a few taps you have the whole world's media at your fingertips, and with a little careful curation you can easily create a customised flow of news and comment that allows you to keep track of what's happening anywhere in the world. You don't have to be a news junkie to appreciate the news apps available for both iPhone and iPad. You can read your favourite daily newspaper or magazine, watch clips of important events, or just keep abreast of developments in your area of interest. The news apps covered here can be roughly split into two types: those that aggregate RSS feeds or Twitter streams and allow you to read news from multiple sources, and those that take all their news from a single source such as The Guardian or the BBC. Each has its benefits. Aggregators are more flexible and allow you to have a broader view of what's happening in the world, but you have to put the work in to find feeds and add them yourself. You are the editor. Single-source apps are curated for you. They have a narrower viewpoint than you would get from multiple sources, particularly if they are associated with a newspaper that has a specific slant on affairs. However, you don't need to put any work in to set them up, and the editorial quality is, usually, of the highest standard. In addition to the apps themselves, we'll show you how you can grab stories and save them for reading offline later. The Daily, an original news publication designed for the iPad, has also now launched. 1. TweetMag Unlike other news aggregators that use RSS feeds, TweetMag, as you'll have gathered from its name, uses your Twitter stream. By tracking the people you follow and using the links in their feeds, TweetMag builds up a picture of the world as it interests you. It then presents the linked stories as your very own Twitter newspaper.
TweetMag can also use lists you've set up on twitter.com, and you can choose from categories and lists that have been curated by other users. The stories are presented beautifully. The front page is hierarchical, with one top story and others displayed in boxes as you scroll down the page. Each story has its headline, the source and an excerpt. Some also have thumbnail pictures. Tapping on a story turns the page and displays that story in full. There's also a sidebar on the right of the screen that shows you the tweet that contained the link, as well as retweets and replies. You can also swipe a story on the front page to quickly see the original tweet and reply or retweet it. In addition to creating news aggregates from your general Twitter stream or from lists, you can search topics or hash tags and create one from the results. If you like what you see and want to save it, tap and hold on its icon at the top of the screen and drag it upwards until the bookmarks bar slides into view. It will then drop into that bar to make it easy to retrieve later. This works incredibly well and makes it easy to create multiple 'newspapers' and store them. Each is updated the next time you read it. There are a few issues with TweetMag, the most obvious of which is performance. The app can be slow to load stories and scrolling down the front page is often less than smooth. In addition, it crashed during testing on a couple of occasions. To combat performance issues, TweetMag has a feature that allows you to permit your iPad's processing cycles to be used to process articles for other users. The idea is that by using the processing cycles of as many iPads as possible to improve speed, everyone benefits. The other issue we had was that on some occasions when we fired up TweetMag, the first few stories came from a variety of sources, but the rest were all from the same source. The first time we used TweetMag, that source was itunes.apple.com, which didn't endear us to the app. The more we used it, though, the greater the variety of sources on the front page. TweetMag is a great way to keep track of the news that interests you and to follow breaking stories and trends, enhanced by the ability to read the full story within the app. At £2.99, it's very reasonably priced, and if its developer manages to resolve the performance issues, it will only go from strength to strength. 2. The Guardian The Guardian's iPhone app has been highly praised, and it's easy to see why. Perhaps the most remarkable feature, however, is its subscription price: £2.99 for six months or £3.99 for a year. For the price of four issues of the newspaper, you can have a whole year's worth of both The Guardian and The Observer.
On launching the app, the first screen presents the day's top stories with pictures and headlines. Tapping on one takes you to the meat of the story. Sections are colour-coded in the same way they are on guardian.co.uk. On the iPhone 4's Retina display, body text is crisp and easily legible. Scrolling down the front page reveals a gallery of multimedia content, allowing you to watch video, look at photographs or listen to audio content. Further down are familiar categories, such as Sport and Culture. You can customise the home screen to show whichever sections you want and in whatever order you choose. You can tell the app to download content for reading offline - great for commuting on the Tube. Stories and sections can be designated as favourites and saved in your Favourites folder, and you can easily see which stories and sections have been trending in the last 24 hours. You can even change the content of the bottom toolbar so that it reflects your interests. A superbly designed and very well thought-out app. 3. BBC News The BBC News app had a troubled gestation. It was announced, along with a BBC Sport app and an iPlayer app, at Mobile World Congress in 2010. After complaints from newspaper publishers, the BBC Trust advised that the apps should be delayed in the UK until it could decide what to do. The News app was eventually launched in the summer, but there's still no sign of the dedicated Sport one.
Launching the app on the iPad presents the familiar BBC News logo followed by a screen that lists the default news categories - World, UK, Politics and so on - down the left side of the screen. Stories within the categories are presented as thumbnail images with a headline beneath, four in a row, taking up half the screen in landscape mode. The other half of the screen is used to display the current story, with a headline, image or video clip, and text below. Tapping a video clip plays it in full-screen mode. Swiping the row of stories in a category reveals more news, while swiping across the text of an individual story moves you to the next one. The little row of dots at the bottom shows how far along the list you are at any point. You can edit the categories that appear and the order in which they're listed, and you can also change the size of the text to make it a bit easier to read if you need to. Stories can be emailed, and shared on Twitter and Facebook. Latest news headlines fade in and out along the top of the screen, but perhaps the best feature is the ability to watch the BBC News channel live on your iPad or iPhone at the press of a button. Be careful, however, if you're on a 3G network, because it'll eat through your monthly data allowance rather quickly - best to stick to Wi-Fi for video. BBC News is a terrific way to keep abreast of general news, and you'll love it if you're a fan of the BBC News channel. The layout is a little awkward - stories feel cramped on the right of the screen - but browsing them is nice and easy. 4. Flipboard Flipboard takes content from your Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Google Reader accounts, and assembles it into a gorgeous 'flipbook'. You can add sections from parts of your accounts, so you could have different sections for, say, Facebook photos of you and Facebook wall posts. You could have different sections for different albums in Flickr or, most usefully, for different feeds or groups in your Google Reader account.
As a tool for keeping what you care about in one place and presenting it stylishly, it's unparalleled. As an app for reading news, however, it's not the best here. There's no way to quickly scroll through your feeds and find the headlines that most interest you, unless you create a separate section. Everything is presented in reverse chronological order, meaning that if, for example, you have a feed of forum posts on an active forum, that will be presented first. Pulse and Reeder offer more flexibility when it comes to quickly scanning headlines. As a whole, though, Flipboard is stunning and you can't argue with the price. 5. Pulse Pulse is an RSS reader with a difference. Instead of displaying feeds as long lists of headlines, it shows them as a grid of images. Feeds can be spread across multiple pages, with up to 12 per page and up to five pages.
Each story is presented as a thumbnail image and a headline. Tapping a story displays it on the right of the iPad screen. Pulse can also display Facebook wall and status updates, and sync with Google Reader. Feeds can be re-arranged so those that interest you most are closest at hand. Pulse is occasionally sluggish, and when showing YouTube videos it slices off the side of the screen, forcing you to watch in fullscreen to see the whole thing. Those minor issues aside, it's excellent. 6. The Early Edition The Early Edition is an RSS reader that pulls in stories from your favourite feeds and displays them like a newspaper. You can sync it with Google Reader or add feeds by importing an OPML file or by typing a URL. Feeds can be filtered in a number of ways, including Today, Last Fetch and Previous Editions. Stories can be shared on Facebook or Twitter, or saved for later in Instapaper. Tapping the Fetch button pulls new stories onto the front page. A long tap on a feed updates only that feed.
The Early Edition does a terrific job of assembling feeds and stories into an inviting layout. Text is easily legible, but less crisp than it could be because of the embossed effect applied to it. The app can also occasionally be sluggish when gathering stories. Those small gripes aside, it's a fun way to read your RSS feeds, though its price means Pulse just edges ahead of it. 7. Reeder Reeder does one thing - it syncs with your Google Reader account, pulls in the newsfeeds you've subscribed to and presents them to you on your iPhone or iPad. It does it with such panache, however, that's it's hard to begrudge paying the small asking price. Feeds are arranged in the categories you've set up in Google Reader and listed in each one by date. Story presentation, particularly in portrait mode, is beautiful on both devices. If you like Instapaper, you'll love this.
And because some feeds don't include the whole article, Reeder can use Readability to pull in the words and key images from most sources. Stories can be shared in a number of ways including Facebook and Twitter, and saved in Instapaper or Read It Later for picking up later. A simple app that's only designed to do one job, but does it exceptionally well. 8. The Economist The Economist app provides a selection of articles from the weekly magazine for free and is updated each Thursday at 9pm. Subscribers to the print title or website get the whole magazine free. For everyone else, it costs £3.49 per issue, which you can get on a one-off basis as an in-app purchase.
The basic free app is limited to six stories, meaning that it does little more than give you a flavour of the issue. Navigation is basic and story layout isn't as elegant as The Guardian. Stories are automatically downloaded for offline reading, so it's perfect for a journey where you might lose signal at some point. We like the ability to listen to audio versions of every story, too. It's worthwhile if you're a subscriber, but a bit expensive and limited otherwise. 9. The Times The Times, like The Telegraph below, takes all of its visual cues from the paper edition, including that famous masthead. It takes several minutes to download each edition, but you can read it as it downloads. Navigation is sluggish and muddled at times - we lost track of where we were all too often. Stories are split across multiple pages, so you have to swipe instead of scroll to continue reading. Several pages have nothing on them but dense, dark text, which be a bit on the intimidating side.
We liked the colour-coding of sections, and the journalism is second to none, so it's worth grabbing the free 30-day subscription to try it out. However, at £9.99 per month, while cheaper than the paper edition, it's rather pricey for casual reading. 10. The Telegraph for iPad The Telegraph's iPad version, which publishes a digest of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, attempts to emulate the look and feel of a real newspaper. It's largely successful in this, but some aspects, such as the mottled grey background, are an unhelpful distraction. White would have looked cleaner and aided legibility. Six story categories are presented in a menu bar along the top of the screen. A drawer-type menu allows other story excerpts to slide in from the left, which is a neat feature. Less welcome is the swipe action to move on to the next story, which all too often fails to work properly.
Because it's a 'best of' app, the content can appear light compared to the newspaper's iPhone app or the Telegraph.co.uk website. But we like that it feels as though you're reading an actual paper.
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