Helllo,

I am very interested in techniques people have for disguising clones.
I am doing extensive stamping on very grainy fairly high rez photos with subtle tonal shifts.

So far I have had the best results using a hard edged brush with long strokes but still run into problems with patterns appearing.

I have actually been stamping at the pixel level to remove these but this is very labor intensive.

Thanks!

A Few Cloning Tips:
Constantly resampling to prevent obvious cloning patterns from emerging.

I like to lower the hardness of my brush just a bit to help the clone areas blend in better.

Also if you have the patch tool, I like to select the area I just cloned and use the patch tool to further help the cloning blend in.

Finally, experiment with the blend mode and opacity of the clone stamp tool.

A couple of good articles on the clone and patch tools.
Digitalretouch.org (http://www.digitalretouch.org/Photoshop7.html)

Thanks very much for the suggestions!

One of the challenges is that what I am working on are images that need to be museum quality (displayed at very large sizes and have easily discernable film grain).

I can not soften my brush at all because that creates blurred out areas.

yes resampling often is good although because I have subtle tonal shifts this can create subtle changes in color.

I will definitely try using the healing brush but my experience with it is that is tends to have the same effect as sharpening and area creating a pixelated quality.

Thanks Again!

Try using a very small, very hard brush and sample like a maniac. Do your cloning on a separate, blank layer. High pass areas of the photo that have good texture that you can use to overlay where you have cloned to match anything that got mushy or otherwise shows you have touched it. Add noise to your cloning areas so it matches the grain in your image - give this a tad bit of Gaussian blur afterwards (.01 or .02) or a median faded to 10-20%. Add monochrome noise btw. clone using lightness, darkness and color modes.

perhaps post an example detail.

EDIT: the best thing to do is to clone so it's not at all noticeable. except in extreme cases, you shouldn't have to disguise anything. it's tedious, but thats the thing with retouching...

Great I will try all of this!