Look at the screen prints below. It’s not a very good photo but it illustrates the problem.
I want to clone the ugly yellow halo away by substituting it with another part of the tree trunk. Source and destination are marked with thin white lines at the red arrows.
In the second screen print the retouch module has been switched on and the cloned area is much darker than the source!
![clone%202|690x388]This tip was given to me by someone I can’t remember.
Place the mouse over the target area, keep SHIFT pressed and scroll the mouse wheel to increase the dotted area and see if that improves it.
With your jpg,
Great, thank you. The tip worked just fine……:o)!
But I don’t understand why. The user manual states: “……the width of the border, i.e. the area with a gradual opacity decay, which can be changed by scrolling when it is highlighted or by shift+scroll from anywhere within the shape………”.
According to this you change the size of the area with gradual opacity decay, but this should not change the “core” clone area in anyway, should it?
Agreed.
EDIT: Depending of feedback from others, we could open a ticket for this
This is not a bug. The cloned area is identical to the reference area as indicated in the screenshot below (notice to the color picker values).
When you decrease the hardness of a drawn shape by Shift+mouse scroll, it just fades the cloned area more smoothly to the original picture so the difference in the luminance becomes less obvious to human eye.
Have you considered leveraging the full capabilities of the “wavelet decompose” function of the module? Seems to me that using the heal tool (rather than the ‘clone’ tool) on a coarse scale might produce satisfactory results.
For additional reference, have a look at an article written by @patdavid (almost 4.5 years ago!). Look for the section called " Removing Stains/Colors/Tones"
Hi’ msd
Thank you for an interesting response…….
It’s correct that the color picker produces the same values for the two areas. I noticed this before posting the topic but the cloned spot is much darker than the source and I thought that the “clone” tool should clone an exact copy of the source area. If there is a difference in luminance between the source and the clone then it’s not an exact copy. Why is this not a bug?
Hi’ Hevii Guy
I will read the article and also try using the “wavelet decompose”/heal tool as you suggest.
When you read the article on the new retouch tool you get the impression that the wavelet decompose is a facility of the new heal tool and that the clone tool is just a “link” to the old spot removal tool. But I see now, that you can use the “wavelet decompose” with the clone tool as well.
I didn’t consider to use the heal tool because I didn’t want to inherit some of the colours from the ugly yellow halo.
I don’t understand why you say the source and the clone have different luminance values when the color picker shows they are the same. Please notice that the luminance values shown in the screenshot above belong to the areas after cloning.
I think the method mentioned by @Hevii_Guy would produce the best result but you can also use color balance instead of retouch and select the lens flare by parametric+drawn masks, then darken/color correct the area.
I must admit that I’m really puzzled because what I see is not what the color picker gets.
I mean, visually speaking, the target area seems significantly darker than the source…
Yes, I agree. If you create two images by cropping the source and target clone regions (so that the rest of the image doesn’t impact your interpretation), I think you’ll find that the two regions are identical. I did so in Gimp, and the histograms of the two regions are very similar (allowing for slight errors in my quick 'n dirty crop regions).
Hi’ msd
Thank you for your response and explanation. Late last night and after having studied some material about luminance I suddenly understod what you ment in your first post:
The source and the clone are identical but the areas surrounding them are slightly different and this tricks the human eye to see the clone as darker than the source!
