In this tutorial I will explain how the Clone Stamp and Spot Healing Brush tools work, and show a few examples of what they can do. Clone stamp is a tool that will copy an area with a brush of your choosing, and then paste that copied area somewhere else on your image. It is great for photo retouching, or generally removing anything you don’t want from a flat image.

Spot healing brush has a similar use but it functions slightly differently. The spot healing brush works like a normal brush in that you paint over an area. When you have an area with differing textures and you want them to become more uniform you paint over the desired area and the tool will equalize the textures in that area.

Specifically for photo retouching this can remove blemishes, moles, scars, or just anything undesirable in the photo. Using the clone stamp followed by the spot healing brush is a great technique for editing out things you don’t want, and making it look like nothing was ever edited.

But be warned that the spot healing brush is not a perfect tool; sometimes the corrections you make will have an extremely blurry effect, or when you have contrasting areas on a photo it will blend things you don’t want it to blend. When things like this happen, just undo and try again.

So here we have an image of Fred Savage in his role as The Mole in Austin Powers. I’ll let you guess why they call him the mole. I’m going to remove his mole.

First I am going to select the clone tool by selecting its shortcut, which is the S key. Then I am going to hold down the alt key on an area of Fred’s skin near the mole and left click. Clone stamp has now recorded this area on the image.

Next I am going to release the alt key, and click on the mole; this will paste the area I chose to copy on the area I clicked. The below example is only the first click.

After a few more clicks and the spot healing brush we get the following result.

Below is a more advanced example of the clone stamp and spot healing brush tools.
The above examples are only the beginning to photo retouching. There are people who retouch photos for a living for example, most of the celebrity photos we see with perfect complexions, highlights, and idealistic lighting. This tutorial is merely an introduction to the practice of photo retouching, but you can see how powerful these tools are.

So there you have it; remember to visit webflostudios and to experiment in photoshop for best results.