I recently got to visit some family back home and spent some time with my adorable nephew! He is such a smiley guy, I couldn’t resist snapping a quick photo while we were playing together.
To work on this photo, I played around with the “cloning tool” on GIMP. As you can see, the background is all black. Well, turns out this little guy was standing in front of some dark shelving when this photo was taken, making the background mostly black to begin with, but with some bothersome remnants of shelves in the background. Hence, I used the cloning tool to erase the remnants of shelves, resulting in a fully black background.
What Does the Cloning Tool Do?
Basically, the cloning tool works by copy the colors of one area of a photo, and placing it on to another area of a photo. So, when selecting the cloning tool from the tool bar, you can first select the area you would like to copy by holding “Ctrl” and clicking on the area you would like to copy. Next, you can draw over the area of your choice by either clicking, or clicking and dragging. This was easier than most tasks with the cloning tool because the background was mostly black to begin with. Generally, it is a fickle task because you have to be careful to make sure that the colors in the area you are copying will blend in naturally over the area you are trying to cover up.
What Else Can it Do?
Many people use the cloning tool to cover blemishes on skin, to erase unwanted things or people from the backgrounds of their photos, or simply to make an area uniform on a photo. It is a handy tool to get familiar with to remove any unwanted elements from a photo!
