Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual

Cloning and Healing

You can use Photoshop’s cloning and healing tools on video clips, but it’s incredibly tedious—you have to edit each frame individually (yawn!). Unfortunately, there’s no magic technique that lets you follow an object through a whole scene to fix it in one go. So pour yourself a nice beverage, settle into your chair, tweak one frame, and then use the navigation buttons in the Timeline panel to go to the next frame and repeat the process. And repeat. And repeat again.

Note

When using the Clone Stamp tool to fix multiple frames of a video, consider turning on the Lock Frame option in the Clone Source panel (Cloning Between Documents). This makes Photoshop keep your source in the same frame you sampled, rather than moving it to the next frame as you clone onto a new frame. If your video clip is fairly stable, this will give you a clean source to clone from. However, if the video is unstable, it may work better to set the Clone Source panel’s Frame Offset field to 1 or 2 so that the source is more similar to your target frame.