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44 • September 2014 • S I G N & D I G I T A L G R A P H I C S Clone Techniques Patching and filling are essential components of the image editing workflow Stephen Romaniello is an artist and educa- tor teaching digital art at Pima Community College in Tucson, Ariz. for more than 20 years. He is a certified instructor in Adobe Photoshop and the author of several books on the creative use of digital graphics so- ware. Steve is the founder of GlobalEye systems, a company that offers training and consulting in digi- tal graphics soware and creative imaging. B y S T e P H e N R o m A N I e L L o e Digital Eye DIGITAL PRINTING AND FINISHING DIGITAL GRAPHICS functions similarly with virtually all software pro- grams. There are however, three additional variations in Photoshop that produce different results. All three can be accessed from Paste Special menu (see Figure 1) or applied with key commands. Paste Into—(Shift+Cmnd/Cntr+V)—is the first variation. It is only available if there is an active selec- T he replication of image content in Photoshop, or "cloning," is a fundamental aspect of the image editing workflow. Cloning can patch and fill areas that have been damaged—and just as useful, it can help eliminate unwanted image content. Cloning in one form or another is essential for compositing image content within a single source document or between multiple documents. There are numerous fast and easy ways to sample and collect pixels, but matching the source content to the destination content so that the pixels blend seamlessly can certainly present chal- lenges. This article will demonstrate some tried and true cloning and copying techniques that assure good results for both small and large areas. Copy/Paste I suppose the simplest type of clone is the "Copy/ Paste" technique. Select an area of the image with any selection tool and press Cmnd (Mac) Cntrl (Win) + C to copy the content to the clipboard—the storage cache for temporary items. Then press Cmnd (Mac) Cntrl (Win) + V and bingo! The content is automati- cally pasted to a new layer. This technique is a basic computer skill that you should memorize because it Figure 1: The Paste Special menu showing the three paste options. Figure 2: The Paste Into com- mand pastes the copied content onto a new layer and creates a layer mask in the shape of the selection.