Photo tweak: clone stamp & darkening borders

After tooling around Flickr and various photoblogs, I’ve come to a realization that most people probably think is obvious: making a really great photo takes not just good gear and knowing how to use it, but also some knowledge and skill in the digital darkroom. Digital post processing in programs like Photoshop can turn a flawed picture to a keeper and a good picture to a fantastic one. Increased flexibility in this area is the reason I started shooting in the RAW format.

I don’t claim to have many (or really any) “fantastic” pictures, but I have learned a few neat post processing tricks from books, online tutorials, and just plain playing around. A lot of them are so simple that they could be put to good use anyone with a camera and a copy of Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, GIMP, or almost any other photo manipulation software. Even if you’re just one of those dads or moms who takes umpteen thousand pictures of the kids ever week. So given that I thought I’d pilot test a new semi regular feature about how to do simple photo fixes, starting with a case study illustrating how improve a photo by cropping, darkening the edges, and removing unwanted parts with the Clone tool.

A picture from my recent trip to a sculpture park provides a good example. Here’s the original image on the left, then the finished image on the right:


The one on the left is pretty much how it looked coming out of the camera. The only thing I did was resize it and save it as a jpg. Click through to see the full sized versions and see if you can spot the main differences.

The first thing I did was import the RAW file into the program I’m currently using for such things, the free beta version of Adobe Lightroom:

I like Lightroom quite a bit and prefer to use it for most of the basic tweaking like contrast, colors, saturation, brightness, hue, exposure, color temperature, and so forth. But as we’ll see in a second, it still can’t beat Photoshop for more powerful manipulations. At any rate, here’s what I did in Lightroom:

  • Boosted contrast
  • Boosted the details in the shadows
  • Dropped the color temperature
  • Lowered the exposure by half an f-stop

It sounds more technical than the approach I really took. I essentially played with the various little sliders until I liked how the image looked. I don’t think I really knew what I was doing half the time. You can do the same thing with any other RAW image editor (Photoshop RAW, Capture 1, Aperture, etc. etc.) –they all do pretty much the same thing. You can do most of the same things with .jpg file if that’s what you shoot in. Or you can just skip this whole step and do all your adjustments in Photoshop –up to you.

So, I had the image looking better, but I really disliked two things:

  1. The brightly lit part of the statue’s base at the foot of the picture, which wasn’t a reflection like the rest of the picture
  2. All those floating leaves, specks, and the underwater light to the right of the statue

To Photoshop! After opening the picture up in Photoshop, I solved the first problem by simply cropping the image so that the statue base and some of the dead space at the top were gone. The second part was a bit tougher, but thanks to Photoshop’s “Clone Stamp” tool I was able to remove all the various flotsam and weird specks from the picture. Just choose the Clone Stamp from the tools palate, alt-click (that is, hold the alt key down then left-click) on a clean part of the picture near the offending detail, and then left click on what you want to remove:


Presto! The Clone Stamp paints over the problem area with a copy of the part of the image you selected when you alt-clicked. I actually use this trick at least once every week for the Sam’s Story pictures. Repeating this process over and over again, I got the image to look something like this:

Better! Almost done. I liked the picture a lot more, but I thought the slightly abstract nature of it meant it could do with a little more manipulation that would draw more attention to the reflection of the shrouded statue in the middle. To do this I employed a technique that painters have been using for billions of years: darkening the edges of the image. This is a snap to do in Photoshop.

First, hit control-a to select the entire image. Then what you want to do is modify that selection to make a border. I did this by going to “Select -> Modify -> Border” from the main menu bar and adding in a pixel value for the border width (I chose 45). This changed the selection to one with a stark border. Since Photoshop applies adjustments only to the portions you have selected, the idea is to modify that selection to create a darkened border. However, if we did that now there would be no transition from darkened to non-darkened area. It’d look more like a semitransparent, black border which isn’t the effect I wanted. The solution to this problem is to “Feather” the selection by going to “Select -> Feather” in the main menu bar and entering in a value for the transition (I did 15 or so). Here’s screenshots:


The selection now looked like what’s shown in the left-hand picture below. To darken it, I brought up the levels dialog box with control-L and slid the little black triangle over to the right until I liked how it looked. Deselect to check it out, then save and I’m done!


That’s it, hope it was clear and someone got something out of it. I’m no guru by any means, but I figure that I know more than some and these basic adjustments can sometimes have the biggest effect on a picture. Sometimes it just takes seeing them in action to prod you into giving them a try next time. If you guys liked this and I do another one, I’ll probably do something with Samantha in it for all the shutterbug parents out there. Maybe something to illustrate creative cropping, dodging/burning, or selective brightening/darkening.

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One thought on “Photo tweak: clone stamp & darkening borders

  1. Is it weird to be commenting on a post that’s a month old? I actually searched for this post so I could tell you thank you for talking about the clone stamp. I had never used it before but after I read this post I tried it and I use it all the time now for cleaning up my pictures. So thanks!
    (I actually like the photo after you tweaked it but with the leaves still in. I think they provide an interesting contrast and play up the fact that it’s a reflection.)

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