PCPhoto
4 Fundamental Photoshop SkillsLearn these essential tools and techniques and you'll be equipped for most common image enhancements |
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Page 5 of 6 Adjusting Stamp Behavior You can adjust the diameter of the brush to match your needs. Generally, a brush size slightly larger than the size of the area you want to retouch is best. There’s a brush-size slider on the Options bar above the image window, which allows you to set any brush size from 1 to 2500 pixels. You can quickly adjust brush size in 10-pixel increments by pressing the bracket keys ( [ to decrease brush diameter, ] to increase it). You can also adjust the brush’s hardness or softness, a soft-edged brush generally being the better choice (a hard-edged brush is good for hard-edged areas such as the edge of a building). The Options bar also provides controls to adjust opacity, blending mode and more. Higher opacities obscure more of the underlying area; lower opacities allow more of the underlying area to show through your cloning. There are too many blending modes to cover here, but two useful ones are Lighten and Darken. Lighten causes your cloning to affect only underlying pixels that are darker than the sampled data; Darken causes your cloning to affect only underlying pixels that are lighter. If you check the Aligned box on the Options bar, the Clone tool will resample pixels each time you click the mouse button—handy when you’re cloning a large or variable area. If you uncheck the Aligned box, the tool will continue to paste the originally sampled area each time you click and drag. If you check the Sample All Layers checkbox, the tool will copy from all visible layers; if you uncheck the box, the tool will copy from only the active layer. It takes practice to master the Rubber Stamp, but put in the practice and you’ll soon have one of Photoshop’s most valuable tools at your disposal. A final tip: Don’t be afraid to zoom the image up to 100% or even more to get a good view of the area you’re working on. With the zoomed image on screen, press the space bar, and the cursor will change to a hand icon; click while holding down the space bar and you can move the image around in the window to access any desired portion of it.   |
