Paint Shop Pro Tip for cloning and retouching small areas. There are times when you need to use the cloning tool/clone brush in small areas of an image to rid it of scratches, stains, dust, or whatever and I am very well aware of the additional tools/effects you can use to do this. However, using all or some these additional tools and effects do not necessarily end up with the desired result and it's out with the cloning tool/clone brush to put it right. The closer you get into an image the smaller the clone brush you need and eventually its effectiveness becomes less. Anti-aliasing drops off and it becomes very difficult to work with accuracy. There is a very simple way to deal with this and I am sure it can be applied in other programs. In a 1024x768 image a size 5 clone brush is 5x5 pixels and tends to leave 'jagged' edges when working in contrasting areas. So what do we do? Simple! Resize the image to 3072x2304 and now you can use a size 15 clone brush to cover the magnified area. And when you're done? Resize the image back to 1024x768! The image below is of my aunt when a bridesmaid. She wanted to disassociate herself from the bride and cut the print in two, which didn't exactly leave herself with a decent picture. I scanned it at 600dpi and increased the canvas on the right of the image by the distance of the centre of the door to the left. I saved a mirror image and cut and pasted as much as possible from one to the other and finished off with the clone brush. I did a little disguising of the left of the arch when finished, so as to make left and right not look like mirror images, tidied the image up a little, and this is the result apart from the fact that I have reduced it in size to fit the gallery. It's nothing special; anyone can do this with practice. All it requires is a little patience and saving of back-up copies along the way so that you can go back to an earlier image if you make a mistake. Just one more tip - playing around with large images can cause 'crashes' so if that happens to you, cut out the part you need to enhance and paste it as a new image. Remember its size and then increase the size by, say a factor of three. Do the repair work, reduce it back to the correct size, copy it, and paste it back in. If you find any mistakes or omissions or have any problems contact escafeld and I will do my best to help. I will even be glad to know if this tip helped. Yours, Dave