Julia Gerace wrote:
Hey All,

I've been trying the method where you sample a spot and tap over other spots to both conceal and to maintain skin texture and even out tones (using the cloning tool)

For some reason, it looks o.k. sometimes and other times, it winds up looking smudgy like...   

are there particular setting? I've tried different opacity and different flow and I'm thinking high opacity, low flow, soft brush but maybe I'm totally off?

thanks,

Julia

Personally... I hardly ever use clone tool on skin... but maybe if u post a visual sample that went well and another one where it went bad, we can tell you why

Settings always depend on very very particular things, specially when cloning.

x

Julia Gerace wrote:
I usually use just the spot healing brush and patch but from reading things on here, I thought I must be doing something really wrong...   if you're not using clone, then maybe I'm not that far off....

I don't use spot healing either tho... u have no control over the sampling area...

x

Julia Gerace wrote:
Hey All,

I've been trying the method where you sample a spot and tap over other spots to both conceal and to maintain skin texture and even out tones (using the cloning tool)

For some reason, it looks o.k. sometimes and other times, it winds up looking smudgy like...

At least three things can cause that.

1. When the brush is soft, the edges will blend the source and target textures, sometimes leaving a soft, smudgy texture. (The danger of a hard brush is leaving visible clone tracks.)

2. If the brush opacity is low, that will also blend two textures and sometimes smooth them out.

3. If the source texture is smoother than the target texture, the latter will be smoothed out where you clone, and that can appear smudgy.

Unlike some others, I do use the clone tool on skin, especially when evening out skin tones or working close to edges. The trick to fixing smudged texture is to heal on top of what you cloned. I generally use two blank layers when fixing skin: one for the clone tool, and the other above that for the healing brush.

Neil Peters Fotografie wrote:
5%, 57%, or 100% of the clone tool is ...never... accurate, or precise.
regardless of the brush you use.

Not accurate or precise in what respect?

I can think of several ways that the clone tool is perfectly accurate and precise. It precisely reproduces the source pixels, and it is dead accurate in placing the target pixels where you want them.

In what way do you find the clone tool lacks accuracy or precision?

CSP Photography wrote:
I set the opacity to around 30% for body, and 20% when cloning on faces.   Then I use Kodak airbrush as my last step to smooth out the skin.   Craig

ok - I use the imagenomic portraiture plugin and bring it down to about 30% after applying -- isn't this using blur in a way though?  (though totally correct me if I'm wrong)   

For the sake of just learning a different method, I'm going to try retouching without using the plug in  : )

Peano wrote:

Not accurate or precise in what respect?

I can think of several ways that the clone tool is perfectly accurate and precise. It precisely reproduces the source pixels, and it is dead accurate in placing the target pixels where you want them.

In what way do you find the clone tool lacks accuracy or precision?

my point was mostly not to totally rely on clone precision.
a simple test is to clone something at 50% ... twice
it should add up to a 100% clone, it doesn't

try adding some shadow area to an extended shadow area at 100%
sometimes it is darker
sometimes it is lighter

Adobe is aware of the issue
but since it is easily remedied with practice
it is not a major concern

there are numerous photo forums on this topic on the web

Neil Peters Fotografie wrote:
my point was mostly not to totally rely on clone precision.
a simple test is to clone something at 50% ... twice
it should add up to a 100% clone, it doesn't

If you learn to use your eyes, the percentage won't matter. The tool is precise in ways that really matter: Replicating source pixels, and doing it in exactly the place you want them. In those respects, the clone tool is flawless.

try adding some shadow area to an extended shadow area at 100%
sometimes it is darker
sometimes it is lighter

I'll wager my last farthing that this isn't a flaw in the tool. The result is darker when you sample from a darker part of the shadow, lighter when you sample from a lighter part.

Neil Peters Fotografie wrote:
my point was mostly not to totally rely on clone precision.
a simple test is to clone something at 50% ... twice
it should add up to a 100% clone, it doesn't

Actually, it shouldn't, so the fact that it doesn't is reasonable.

Consider a trivial example sequence: black cloning over white at 50%

The first pass would add 50% black to a white background--you'll get ~50% brightness gray where it covers. (Less around the edges if you're using a soft-edged brush.)

The second pass would add 50% black to a 50% gray background, leaving around 25% brightness gray. That's what I would expect it to do.

A third pass would add 50% black again, this time to a 25% gray background, taking it to ~12%. (etc.)

Note that it's not limited to cloning. All partial-opacity brushes operate this way.


This is a very common misunderstanding--math students often have difficulty with this issue when they first use fractional math in high school, for example--but once it's properly understood, the behavior is entirely predictable, since it's based entirely on the contents of the source and destination, and not what a random user might hope for.

Neil Peters Fotografie wrote:
try adding some shadow area to an extended shadow area at 100%
sometimes it is darker
sometimes it is lighter

Is that because it's actually lighter than the area it's being added to, even if it appears to be darker to a human eye because of local contrast?

Neil Peters Fotografie wrote:
Adobe is aware of the issue
but since it is easily remedied with practice
it is not a major concern

The first issue isn't something which I would want changed, as it behaves as I would expect it to behave. OTOH, I understand how it operates.

Julia, as Peano notes, the soft-edge brush with the cloning tool is a mixed blessing. It lets the edges blend in, but it also introduces softening by that blending. The same thing goes for sub-100% cloning; you will get softening of the textures.

What often works well is to combine the clone and healing operations to take advantage of what each one does well--clone to get the appropriate color and brightness, then heal to restore/replace the texture.

Cloning copies exact pixels from one place to another. (They can be resized, rotated, or whatever in CS3 or later, but otherwise they're movements of identical pixels.)

Healing/Patching copies the texture of the source to the destination, and uses the color and luminosity of the surrounding pixels of that destination to determine color and luminosity.

d00dle wrote:
i heard always clone @100% or u'll get smudgy effect. however, @100% u'll get hard edge (maybe im just not good with clone tool). patch tool, then dodge or burn after seems to work well for me. only use clone tool around the edges theses days.

Even at 100%, if you use a soft brush, you can get "smudgy" edges where the soft brush blends one texture with another. Not always, but it can happen. That's why I often use healing on top of cloning. When you need to even out skin tones, the clone tool usually works best. If you lose some texture in the process, you can bring that back with the healing brush.