Using the Clone Tool to Remove Distractions Using Either GIMP or Photoshop

OK, let's face it, sometimes when you pull a photo up at full size on your computer screen, you notice that little distracting something that shouldn't be there. For example, it could be....

• String that you used to hold upright while you took a photo of the item.

See the bit of bright green string holding up the handle
of this tote bag? That's something you can clone out.
And the next time around, use monofilament fishing line,
which isn't so obvious to begin with.

• Maybe it's a speck of dusk or lint. Or worse, a stray hair. (I don't care if you're selling pet items, as a buyer, I don't want to see any sort of hair in the background, more or less on the item.) 

I love the angle on this bag, but the white
paper didn't fully cover all of the background.

• Let's say you took a photo of the all the items that didn't sell after coming home from your last craft fair. Try as you might to hide all of the price tags that you attached to the item, you still end up with a corner of that tag sticking out from behind the item. 

• A part of the background that's imperfect. For example, a crease in the paper you used for the background, an snag in the fabric that you've placed under the item, or maybe you didn't use a big enough sheet of paper/material to fully cover all of the background.

• If you took photos outside, it might be an unwanted background object in the distance. 

Now, if you find a small, distracting THING in your photo (whatever it may be), you have three possible ways to deal with it:

1. Start all over and take all new photos.
2. Crop it out, so it doesn't show.
3. Use the rubber stamp or clone tool to make it vanish from your photo. 

The clone tool icons look similar in both GIMP and
Adobe Photoshop. This particular image is from GIMP.

The clone tool lets you paint over a part of your image using another part of the image as a reference. It's good for removing small spots of lint as well as bigger distractions. For example, I often hang bags from a bit of thread or fishing line before I photograph them so the handles stick up and the bag doesn't flop over.  I usually clone over any bits of fishing line that are visible against the object before I remove the background, which I detail how to do here.

Note: I only use the clone tool to remove background elements or stray bits of lint that shouldn't be in the image. These are things that aren't actually a part of the product itself. Once you know how to use the clone tool, it can be very tempting to remove flaws in your product, such as a small scratch on a piece of jewelry. I never want to edit the photo so that the product's photo will be better than what my customer will actually receive.

To use the clone tool, select the tool, then click the CTRL button where you'd like the tool to pull from. The program will place a little set of cross-hairs there as a reminder of where you're painting from:

In GIMP, click CTRL somewhere on the image
to tell the program where to paint from.
Cross hairs will appear.

 Then go to another part of the image and paint. You'll get something like this:

Now one of the differences between Photoshop's rubber stamp tool and GIMP's clone tool is that 1) Photoshop uses ALT rather than CTRL to define where to pull from and 2) if you stop cloning for some reason and then move to a totally different area, the two programs handle things a bit differently. In GIMP, it'll start painting wherever that little set of cross-hairs happens to be. In Photoshop, it'll remember that first place that you clicked and then pick an area relative to it. For both of these photos, I only defined where to start cloning from once:

GIMP: the second time I cloned, it started to paint directly
from the cross-hair area again (on the embroidery).
This gave me two cloned embroidery designs.

Photoshop: The second time I cloned, it used drew from an
area relative to where I defined. This gave me a cloned
embroidery design and a cloned car windshield.

In order to fully clone out an object, you may need to define where to clone from several times.


 Note #2: If you decide that there's an area of the image that needs to be cloned out, then I recommend making a copy of the original onto another layer. Make all of your permanent changes to the image on the copied layer, just in case you want to go back to the original source material later. This is also true if you decide to adjust the original image in other ways - say by using the dodge or burn tool to adjust the contrast of specific areas of the image. BE SURE that you're working on the correct layer.


Looking for more GIMP and Photography tutorials?

• How to Easily Set Up a White Background
• How to Crop and Resize Images in GIMP and Photoshop