Cloning

We found Amelia Earhart!

Varieties of visual commentary

Digital tools empower culture producers to create visual commentary using graphic content both on and off of the screen. Media makers can change the appearance of virtually anything with tools such as copy, paste, mask, and clone. So the question is: given the opportunity to change any image, message, or text, where would you begin?

Subversion

Your answer depends upon your interests but often emerges from social forces like political tension. In other words, an oppressed group can reclaim messages of a dominant paradigm. This can be done by altering the symbolism embedded in words or images in the physical and/or digital world. These messages might appear in museums, on city streets, or in cyberspace. The “subversive” part of the message-making is the manner in which the aesthetics of the altered media rely upon the viewer’s visual and intellectual understanding of the dominant culture prior to the subversive media confrontation. The Billboard Liberation Front and The Anti-Advertising Agency create work that illustrates this idea.

The Billboard Liberation Front is a group of San Franciscan message-makers who aim to repurpose and “improve” billboard messages by painting or pasting them on top of preexisting billboards. The group began their mission in 1977 and has grown into a worldwide phenomenon by collecting images on the web. From The Billboard Liberation Front Manifesto:

In No Logo, Naomi Klein illustrates how advertisers are utilizing methods common to contemporary artists to create brand awareness. She writes:

“Pepsi’s on-going threat to project its logo onto the moon’s surface hasn’t yet materialized, but Mattel did paint an entire street in Salford, England, ‘a shriekingly bright bubblegum hue’ of pink – houses, porches, trees, road, sidewalk, dogs, and cars were all accessories in the televised celebrations of Barbie Pink Month. Barbie is but one small part of the ballooning $30 billion ‘experiential communication’ industry, the phrase now used to encompass the staging of such branded pieces of corporate performance art and other ‘happenings.’” 

— Naomi Klein

Despite this co-opt, satire and parody are still potent artistic devices in an era of political uncertainty. In 2016, williamCromar created continuous profile (head of drumpf) as a satirical commentary on a contemporaneous figure’s authoritarian communication (and later, governing) style. The work was a conceptual “clone” of a famous work by Italian Futurist sculptor Renato Bertelli, the Continuous Profile (Head of Mussolini). Unlike the head of drumpf, which was a subversion, Bertelli’s portrait of Mussolini was an honorific commemoration of the Italian Fascist dictator, whom the Futurists adored.

Commemoration

So we can see that subversion is just one way to use visual commentary! Our motivation in this exercise will not be satirical. Rather, we will create a celebratory commemoration, not of a dictator, but of someone we think is deserving of a tribute. As a young woman, legendary aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart attended The Ogontz School, which later became the campus of the school where I teach studios. To honor her legacy, we will create an image using cloning. By placing her face among the first all-female flight crew in the US Air Force, we can imply a spiritual lineage between these women and the trailblazing Amelia.

Using the Clone Stamp Tool

In this exercise, we will use two images in the public domain.

The first all-female crew can be downloaded at the link above or from Wikimedia Commons at this link.

A historic image of Amelia Earhart can also be downloaded at the link above or from Wikimedia Commons at this link.

Copy the background pattern

Hello Clone Stamp Tool

The Clone Stamp Tool is used to replace small areas of a layer with a sample of an image and is applied with a brush that can vary in size and edge quality. Using a soft brush will make the cloned sample appear to blend into the original image, even though we do all of our cloning on a new layer. Be careful with your application of the Clone Stamp Tool, since the soft brush creates a little bit of a blur on the image, and clicking with the soft brush repeatedly will result in a blurry area in your image. The purpose of cloning here is to create an undetectable image transformation. Creating a blurry area on the image will draw attention to that area. To achieve the transformation, the clone must be made in such a way that the viewer is unaware of the manipulation.

Pick up the Clone Stamp Tool from the Tool Palette. In the Options Palette, set the brush to about 20 pixels. Check the Align button and make sure that Sample All Layers is selected from the pulldown menu.

Set the sample origin

Apply the sample

After setting the sample origin, release OPTION but keep the Clone Stamp active. Since we used the visual edge between red and white stripes, position the mouse on top of a target red-white edge. You’ll see your sample origin “ghosting” inside the brush diameter, and this will help you align the edge of the sample with the edge of the target.

Mind your History Palette!

Pay close attention to your brushwork and the amount of history it uses in the History Palette. Determine if the first click is blended or not by looking at the surrounding values. Decide if your new sample is blending in. If it does, move on to the next area. Always OPTION+click to create a new sample before brushing. If the first click does not blend perfectly, use COMMAND+Z or the History Palette undo the last step, and try it again.

Work around all of the obvious rectangle edges to blend them into submission. You will probably need to create several new OPTION+click sample origins for the flag, each time clicking afterward with the brush to apply the clone. We finished the clone using about 15 precise mouse clicks or short click-drags, enough to get the job done without overfilling our History.

Adding Amelia

Black and white

Scaling Amelia’s head

Moving Amelia into place

Adding layer masks

Do not delete image data. Avoid the eraser. Using the eraser is destructive editing, a cardinal sin of image editing. Instead, you will learn to use masks, which allow non-destructive edits.

Add a mask over an image to hide part of it, instead of destructively erasing pixel data. Masks do not delete or alter image data, they simply hide or show parts of images. Masks operate in black (hidden), white (revealed), and shades of gray (transparent, partially hidden). We will use a Layer Mask on the amelia layer to blend her into the new background.

First, use the key command letter d, which loads black and white as the default foreground and background colors, then practice pressing the x key to switch the foreground and background colors. You’ll be able to quickly switch from painting black to hide and white to show information with the mask.

Paint the mask

Create a layer mask on the Amelia layer with the Add Layer Mask button at the bottom of the Layers panel: it looks like a square donut with a round hole. This mask will hide the background around Amelia’s head. Notice that the layer now has an icon for the image and an icon for the mask. The mask is currently active — there is a white frame around the mask icon.

Click on the Brush tool and make sure that the default colors are loaded into the foreground/background color chips (black as the foreground, white as the background color). Besides the key commands mentioned above, the colors can be reset by clicking on the small black/white color chip icon in the top left area of the actual color chips in the Tools panel.

Observe the icon for the mask in the Layers panel. Since everything on the layer is revealed, notice the entire mask is white. Use the Brush tool with black paint while the mask is active, to hide the background. If you make a mistake, switch to white paint to retrieve hidden parts of the image. Practice painting with black and white paint. Paint with different size brushes and notice what happens with a soft or hard brush or with the brush set at different opacities.

Masking Amelia’s head

Masking the flag at Amelia’s neck

Refine the mask edges

Tonal and lighting adjustments

The scale and edges are great but the image still looks fake. Amelia looks like she’s glowing. We need to adjust the tone and light of Amelia’s photo to match the conditions in the crew shot. This takes a bit of analytical skill and a trained eye, both of which you’ll acquire by the end of this section.

First, do an analytical comparison of the photographs:

There are a lot of inconsistencies between the images, which is why the results are still unconvincing.

Before starting the tonal manipulations, you will have to click back on the content portion — leaving the mask — of the Amelia layer. Photoshop indicates which part of the layer you are working on by bracketing the corners of its icon in the Layers panel with a white frame. The title bar in the document also reflects the area that is currently active. If the mask is active, the Burn tool used in the next step will affect only the mask, so make sure Amelia’s layer content is active by selecting it!

Reconcile shadow tone

Reconcile brightness

Reconcile lighting with Dodge and Burn

Burning and dodging are photographic manipulations native to the traditional darkroom. In the darkroom, additional exposure time increases the amount of light hitting the paper. This can be done selectively with physical masks, resulting in a burned area of the image. Burning darkens the value of that portion of the print. Light can also be blocked during the exposure by dodging over image areas where the tonal values are too dark with a small tool, resulting in a lightened area of the print.

The Dodge Tool can really eat up History! Keep the History Palette open so you can control it. By experimenting with brush size, softness, range, and exposure values in the Options Palette, you can find the right dodge settings to avoid overuse of the tool. In our sample, we found the following to be optimal:

• On the right jaw and under the chin, 4 click-hold-drag passes with a 36 px soft Dodge brush with Range: Shadows and Exposure: 60%. 
• On the eyes, 2 clicks with the same settings.
• On the nose, 4 clicks with the same settings.

We experimented with these steps:

• On the forehead, 1 click-hold-drag pass with a 36 px soft Burn brush with Range: Highlights and Exposure: 10%.
• On the left cheekbone down to the mouth, 1 click with the same settings.
• On the right cheekbone down to the mouth, 1 click with the same settings.

Final tweaks for a pro finish

You might be satisfied after the last step, but a couple of minor refinements will complete the job.

Highlights and shadows

The first of these is to give Amelia’s face the highlights and shadows one expects from a flash uplighting a scene. Flash illumination causes specular highlights, very bright points of light reflecting off of smooth surfaces. Amelia’s face has practically no specular highlighting. Flash illumination also creates strong, sharp shadows, of which we see none near Amelia’s neck. So we’ll do the following in a new layer called highlights/shadows:

Noise

Save and share

Amelia’s journey is complete, and she’s found her place among her fellow female aviators at last! The final file is zoomed out below to place all this detailed work in the larger context. When you are satisfied with your results, save the TIFF file one more time, then save it as a PNG file to post.

As you post your work, consider the philosophical questions Photoshop has raised in its storied history as an image editor: When are manipulations of reality ethical? When are they not? What percentage of images online, in magazines, and advertising do you think are manipulated by image editing? How does image editing affect our sense of security in our own self-images? What responsibility do artists share?

Credits