The clone stamp tool is essential for retouching and removing unwanted items from your photos. It's a great way to copy part of an image to another part and it does have many uses. Once you get the hang of this tool, it might be one of your favorites for retouching. First, you can get started by clicking on the S key on your keyboard or selecting the stamp tool in the main tool menu.

Let's use the following beach photo as an example. If we want to remove some of the leaves in the sand, we can paint them away with the clone stamp tool. For this example, let's remove the leaf that is in the center of the image. The first time you click on the tool with an image, it will turn your cursor into a circle and prompt you with the Click on an area to define the source clone message. I'll click on an area of the sand to the right-hand side of the leaf that is of the same texture that you want to replace. This will be my source that will be used to paint over the leaf. The key to getting it to work well is to select the correct type of brush. Generally, for removing items you will want a fairly large and soft brush. To select a new brush, just click on the Brushes icon at the top-left corner of the screen and select a soft brush from the brush list.

For more information on brushes and creating your own custom brush presets, see the very end of this chapter.

Once you select a brush, start clicking to paint over the leaf and clone the area that you first selected. As you move the cursor, the area you had selected as the source will move with you, so pay careful attention to the area that is being cloned. When you get to a point where you are cloning something you don't want to, then you can always set a new starting area for the source clone. To do this, just click on the target-like icon that is at the top-left corner of the main screen right next to the gear icon. Then select any part of the image to set a new source clone.

The following is the edited image with the leaf in the middle cloned out:

Another very quick way of removing unwanted images is using the healing tool . This automates the entire process of removing an unwanted item from the scene. In many scenes, if you are removing something that is set on a background that has a uniform design such as sand, grass, or a textured wall, it can work flawlessly and can be a very quick way of removing items. However, if the item you are removing is set against something that isn't a textured background, it might give you better results to use the stamp tool or something else.

To use the healing tool, click on the Band-Aid-like icon in the toolbar. Then click and paint over the image you would like to remove and watch it do its magic! Another way you can use the healing tool is by creating a selection by using any of the selection tools. Once you have the selection ready, click on the healing tool. If you click on the tool setting menu, the first option will be Heal Selection. Click on this to heal the selection you have. In the following screenshot, you can see how to simply select the middle leaf and heal the selection: