Painter 8 Power Tip:
Resetting the Clone Source

Jeremy Sutton

This tutorial is an answer to the following email I received from Joanie Ford:
"When I am painting I mistakenly push the ALT key on the PC and that turns my cursor into a cross hair. Then I get a green dot with a "1" beside it. It looks like I am picking a cloning spot from another part of the picture. I don't know how to get back to cloning as I was before this happened. I would shut down the program and hope it would go away. Now I think I just look under file, and see what I am using for my cloning source. If you think I am confused, that is because I am. If you can understand what I am saying and tell me what to do when that happens that would be great. Thanks!"

Here is my answer to Joanie and anyone else who finds that they inadvertently get that annoying green dot and cross hairs that seems to ruin their cloning.

1. Normally when you open a source image, make a clone copy, and then start using a clone brush on your copy (the destination image), you see a small cross hair on your original source image indicating where the clone brush is getting its color information.

2. When you want to pick color from your image using the keyboard shortcut for the Dropper tool you must make sure you are using a NON-CLONING brush. With a regular non-cloning brush the keyboard shortcuts Option on Mac or Alt on PC temporarily covert your brush cursor into  the Dropper tool for picking color. The problem arises when you use Option/Alt with a CLONING brush selected. Instead of temprarily converting the cursor into the Dropper tool, you instead inadvertently reset the clone source start point. As you press the key your cursor changes into a cross hair. When you click in the image a green dot and the number 1 appear momentarily indicating the new starting point for cloning, which is now in your current image.

3. Now as you paint with the clone brush you see a cross hair in the same image following your cursor around and the color you paint is being taken from the position of the cross hair.                                              

4. Obviously you can use this to your advantage when you wish to copy a section of an image into the same image. However if all you wanted to do was clone from one image to another then this can be annoying.

5. There are two steps to resolve this situation. The first is to choose File > Clone Source and manually reset the clone source to the original source image.

6. This first step alone still leaves you with a mis-correspondence between the two images as you clone. The second step is to choose Restore Default variant in the Brush Selector pop-up menu.

You are now home and dry and can continue working happily!

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