The clone tool allows you fix images by drawing out things you don't want to see, with pieces of texture taken from other parts of the same image.
If you try to draw something out with a regular brush it doesn't work well. Large areas of a single color, or even a soft brushed color, are very noticeable and look terrible.
The solution is the clone tool.
I have a picture here with some penguins.
We are going to draw out some of the penguins using textures of dirt and grass from the photo. If you want to try this yourself, right click on the image to download it, and then give this a try.
It's in the tool bar, usually on the left side.
Make sure the right tool is selected, and that the brush we are using is a reasonable size for the item we want to erase.
We 're going to get rid of the penguin right to the right of my head in the picture.
Our drawing tool is set for a soft 13 pixel brush, which seems fine.
Option-click on the spot you want to copy from. (That's for Mac, there's some equivalent on Windows, try Control or Alt.)
When you hold the option button, the cursor turns into a little bulls eye. Click on the spot you want to sample. I'm going to click a little to the right of the penguin, trying to match the textures behing the penguin.
Now release the option button, and start drawing on top of the penguin. As you do so, grass and dirt from around the sample spot will be copied and the penguin will dissappear.
Here I have copied texture from about 20 pixels away to cover the penguin. It's gone but we see repetition of some of the ground texture.
Essentially you will be copying pixels from that sample spot. As you move the mouse around you will copy more and more pixels.
If you go to far you may copy something you don't want. It may be necessary to undo, or to sample several times to get enough.
I'm going to sample a few more times, and rough it up so that it is less noticeable.
I'm going to go ahead and draw out more of the penguins. This next image is sort of in progress. Some of the penguins are gone, some are only partially gone, so you can see the process.
It's actually pretty amazing what you can do with a small amount of effort.
If you look where the penguins were drawn out, you should be able to detect where I copied grass and dirt textures from. Usually I will try to choose a spot that has matching levels of light and dark. I use soft edges, and I take great pains to match shadows and lightness and darkness.
After a few hours working with photoshop you will be amazine how easy it is to doctor photos, and you'll never believe anything you see in a news picture any more. It's just so easy to change things and very hard to detect. I've done a pretty sloppy job here, but if I was careful, you would have no idea I'd fixed this picture.
The same strategies can be used to remove telephone wires, weeds in grass, rust on cars, pimples on faces, even unwanted ex's from your photos.