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Adobe After Effects 6.5
Retouch footage using clone presets and
shortcuts-galore
Blue sky, fluffy clouds, trees swaying in the breeze,
couples strolling on the boardwalk, and power lines
hovering menacingly above; oops, ain’t it hard to avoid
power lines in your footage nowadays? The newly
outfitted clone stamp tool in Adobe® After Effects® 6.5
lets you replace those power lines with more blue sky
and fluffy clouds, and faster than ever before.
You can download the footage that was used to create
this tutorial.
1. Set up the project and composition.
Choose File > New > New Project. Drag the file you
want to retouch and any other files you want to clone
from to the project window (we used statue01.mov and
leaves.mov). Drag the file that needs retouching
(statue01.mov in our example) from the project
window to the Create a New Composition button. In
the Composition window, double-click the layer to
display it in a Layer window.
2. Set up the clone stamp tool options.
Select the clone stamp tool in the Tools palette. If you’re
using our project files, set up the Paint palette options
as they appear in this step’s illustration. We chose
Constant for the Duration option because the power
lines we’ll remove are in the same position in all frames
of our footage. Constant makes each clone stroke
appear on the current frame and all subsequent frames.
If the details you want to remove appear on only a single
frame or change position from frame to frame, choose
Single Frame instead; if the details appear on more than
one frame but not all frames, choose Constant, and
then resize the brush stroke’s duration bar to the desired
time frame. Choose the layer you want to clone from
the Source menu. Deselect Aligned if you want each
new stroke to begin from the same starting sample
point, or select Aligned to sample from the layer at a
fixed offset.
3. Clone desired areas to brush over undesired
areas.
Alt-click (Windows) or Option-click (Mac OS) where
you want to start cloning from in the Layer window.
(We sampled an unobstructed area of the sky close to a
power line to ensure that the resulting clone stroke
matches the surrounding tone and color.) To apply the
clone stroke, drag over the detail you want to remove
(in our footage, the power line). If your clone stroke
isn’t quite right, you can clean it up in the next step.
Tutorial
 ADOBE AFTER EFFECTS 6.5 2
Retouch footage using clone presets and shortcuts-galore

In this step’s illustration, point 1 marks our sampling
point, point 2 marks the start of our stroke, and point 3
marks the end of our dragging. When we set the source
position and created a clone stroke, After Effects
automatically set up the first clone preset in the Paint
palette, simply because the first clone preset button was
active. Each clone preset saves the current Aligned, Lock
Source Time, Source Time Shift, Offset/Source Point,
and Source layer option settings. When we need to
clone from an area above where we’re applying a clone
stroke, we can quickly click the first clone preset button
in the Paint palette and begin cloning.
5. Remove a straight line with two clicks and no
dragging.
Click the second clone preset button in the Paint palette
to preserve the first clone preset and set a new preset.
Alt-click (Windows) or Option-click (Mac OS) the area
you want to start cloning from. To clone over a straight
continuous area, click one end of the straight area, and
then Shift-click the other end.
To remove a straight power line in our footage, we
sampled an area of the sky very close to one end of the
power line (point 1 in this step’s illustration). Next, we
clicked the power line at the end that’s near where we
sampled from (point 2), and Shift-clicked the power
line’s opposite end (point 3).

4. Use a keyboard shortcut to erase portions of

the last stroke.
6. Use clone preset shortcuts to remove
Hold down Ctrl+Alt+Shift (Windows) or
Command+Option+Shift (Mac OS) while dragging remaining details.
over unwanted areas in the clone stroke. Click a different clone preset button, and set the starting
sample point when the clone presets you’ve already set
This keyboard shortcut switches the clone stamp tool to
don’t meet your cloning needs. To quickly switch to a
the eraser tool and uses the same option settings that
different clone preset as you clone out remaining
were last used with the eraser tool. If those settings
details, press a number key between 3 and 7; 3 selects
aren’t suitable, select the eraser tool from the Tools
the first preset, 4 selects the second preset, and so on.
palette, and choose a brush from the brushes pop-up
menu in the Paint palette.
Using this keyboard shortcut with the clone stamp tool
lets you erase only the last clone stroke that you created.
To erase any clone stroke in your layer, select the eraser
tool, choose Paint Only from the Erase menu in the
Paint palette, and use the eraser tool.

Tutorial

If you have difficulty keeping track of which clone
preset has the offset you need, select Clone Source
Overlay in the Paint palette, and then press 3 through 7
on the keyboard while the pointer is in the Layer
window. The clone source overlay displays a translucent
image of the layer you’re sampling from over the current
layer; the current sampling point appears directly below
the clone tool pointer.
7. Clone from a different layer and a different
point in time.
Identify a file that you want to clone, and drag it from the
project window to the Timeline window and below the
layer you’ve been retouching. (We want to add some
foliage to the upper right corner of our statue01 layer, so
we dragged leaves.mov from the project window to the
Timeline window.) Make the layer window active again.
Select the clone stamp tool in the Tools palette. In the
Paint palette, choose your new layer (leaves.mov in our
project) from the Source menu, click the Reset Clone
Source Offset to Zero button, and then select Clone
Source Overlay in the Paint palette. Scrub the Source
Time Shift value until you see the frame that you want to
begin cloning from (frame 22 in our project); as you
scrub the value, the clone source overlay displays each
passing frame. Alt+Shift-drag (Windows) or
Option+Shift-drag (Mac OS) from a point that you want
to clone in the clone source overlay until the clone source
overlay is in the desired position. Now drag over the clone
source overlay to clone it into the current footage.
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ADOBE AFTER EFFECTS 6.5 3
Retouch footage using clone presets and shortcuts-galore
In our example, we want to clone in only the branches
in the middle portion of the leaves.mov layer and
position them in the upper right corner of the
statue01.mov layer. So we dragged from the leftmost
point of the branch to the right until it was in the
desired position.
8. Change the blending mode of a clone stroke.
If you want to change the blending mode of a clone
stroke, in the Timeline window expand the layer you’ve
been reoutching, and expand its Effects group and the
Paint group; then select the topmost clone stroke in the
Timeline window. If you made multiple clone strokes to
clone in areas from the other layer, Shift-click those
strokes in the Timeline window. When you have all of
the clone strokes selected, choose a blending mode from
the Blending Modes pop-up menu adjacent to a
selected clone stroke.
To eliminate any white areas of the sky in our footage,
which we accidently cloned in from the leaves.mov
layer, we could painstakingly erase those areas with a
hard-edged brush, frame by frame. Instead, applying
the Multiply blending mode to those clone strokes gives
them the appearance we want.