• Open your stock photo and reach for your Clone Stamp Tool. You will find this on your left hand toolbar.

• Zoom in to the watermarked area of your stock image, CTRL and + should do it.
• Hold Alt down. This will turn the circle cursor thingy of your Clone Stamp Tool into a circled cross.
• Select an are on the screen that is not watermarked but has the same colorings, or as close as possible to the color shades of the watermarked area.
• Once you identify your area, click on that exact spot. This will copy the settings of that area.
• Go to the watermarked area with has similar colorings to the one you just selected and start painting over it. This will paste the settings of the watermark free area.

• Continue this process with the rest of your picture and remember to switch the copied area every few clicks so the de-watermarked area does not seem fake.
• Rinse and repeat until you have removed the entire watermark body. In the end zoom out and go back to areas that may require a few more brushes.

And there you have it, sweat free.

Open a front facing photo of yourself or anyone else for all that matters. The eyes and nose are the most crucial features we will be manipulating on this tutorial so make sure you have a clear view of them.

Eyes shape

• First select the Elliptical marquee tool and select the eyes. Use the Feather tool with approx. 10pixels. Copy and Paste them on a new layer.
• Select Edit -> Transform and the Scale to give them an elliptical shape and make them bigger. You may want to use an avatar poster for this exercise to get the right shape and scale.

• Select each eye separately and use Skew to give them their final shape. You will find the Skew selection under Edit->Transform.

Eyebrows

• If you have to thin out the eyebrows use the Clone Stamp Tool.
• Create a new layer and lighten the eyebrows color using a soft round brush. Choose white color and opacity around 20-25%, adjust the brush size to fit the eyebrows width.

• Next equally crucial step is the navi nose. We will use the Polygonal Lasso tool to select the nose. Set the feather tool with pixel set at 10pxls. Copy and paste it on a new layer.
• To change its shape and size we will use Edit->Transform and then Scale and Perspective.

Eyes Color

1. Next you want to create the Avatar eyes. Create a new layer and choose use the Elliptical Marquee Tool to select the iris (thats the colored part of the eye) .
2. Next take a soft round brush and choose a grey-blue color and paint all over the iris.
3. On the same layer choose the elliptical marquee tool and after choosing black as a color paint the centre of the iris (thats the black bit of the eye)
4. Create a new layer, paint lines on the iris with a soft brush and use a color slightly lighter than the existing iris color.
5. Use the smudge tool to smudge over the lines you just drew. Also smudge the black part of the iris.

Use the image below to help you visualize the steps above.

• Here is a very cool trick that will save you loads of time. Merge all the layers of the eye you just edited, replicate the new merged layer and use flip to apply this layer to the other eye as well.
• Zoom out of the eyes area.

Skin

• Now lets do some face painting! Create a new adjustment layer and choose Gradient Map. Choose the color settings as shown below.

• Create a new layer and choose a soft round brush with white color  and width approx. 9 pixels. And throw draw dots on your Navi face. Change the blending mode into Overlay.

• Create a new layer and choose a soft round brush with a deep blue color like #002542. Draw the lines on the face to your liking. Here is where you can get really creative!
• Apply a gaussian blur of 5 pixels and reduce the opacity of your new layer to around 20-30% .
• Go to your blending mode drop down menu on your layer and change this to Vivid light.

Congratulations on creating your Avatar Navi persona!

To start things of, let’s see where you find the patch tool. The patch tool is found in the tools palette, it is possible that at first glance you’ll only see the “spot healing brush tool”, which is the default value of this particular tools suite. By holding your mouse down over the spot healing brush tool, you’ll see the patch tool as the third choice in the little tools menu that pop up.

The short cut key is “J”, and here’s another very quick but useful tip: If you have a tool with several sub-tools, holding down the shift key, followed by the corresponding short cut key (shift + J in our example) - you can quickly switch between the tools in the tools suite.

So now on to the fundamental questions; what is the patch tool, and what can it be used for? The patch tool works similar to the clone stamp tool, where you’re able to sample an area of an image and apply it on top of the area you’d like to ‘correct’.

In our sample image, we see a woman that has some kind of black eye (more like blue and red!) underneath her eye. So what we’d like to do is of course eliminate this using the magic of the patch tool.

The patch tool works very similar to the lasso tool when starting off. All you have to do is make a selection by clicking and dragging out an area around the area you’d like to fix. You can also use the lasso tool to make your selection, if you do use the lasso tool to make your selection, make sure you go back to the patch tool for the next steps.

When you’ve made your selection using either the patch tool or the lasso tool, all you have to do is drag outward from starting inside the selection. Drag outwards to an area that you want the sample area to be. So in this case, we of course want the blemish area to look similar to the skin area. The awesome thing with the patch tool is that you always get to see a preview of the area you’d like to patch your selection with. Nifty.

Now drag-n-drop; What should have happened now is that it has sampled our area and applied the corrections on top of your original selected area. To fix other smaller areas, you can either use the clone stamp tool, or use the patch tool again. The blemish is completely gone, and it took around a minute!

So if you’re working on an image were there’s a much larger black eye/blemish and the clone stamp tool might not be the best option, check out the patch tool and practice!

On our example picture there is an unwanted piece of trash at the left of the image. We want to get rid of that but without giving the image a fake appearance.

What we need is the Clone Stamp tool, this will allow us to choose a sample from our image such as the grass in the background and paint that over another location on our image.

Once selected move your cursor to a clean area of your image near the item you want to remove and press and hold the alt key and click. Now that we have the sample we can begin painting over the unwanted item. As you paint using the Stamp Tool you will notice that the object is replaced with the pattern of the area you selected earlier. Every now and then you may need to reselect an area to use as pattern so that the result will not look very canonical.

With some practise and a little time you can easily perfect this method.

Access the Patch tool on the left side bar of you Photoshop and draw around the wrinkle area that you want to fix. Once done click and drag to a smooth area of the skin of similar luminosity. You will notice that the wrinkled area is smoothed out.

In order to perfect that use the Clone Stamp tool and by dragging it over the edges of the newly edited areas smooth out the uneven areas. Repeat the Patch tool application on all the wrinkled areas of your image. It is best to do this in smaller areas to achieve best blending. Once you are done again smooth out the result using the Clone Stamp tool.

Finally using the airbrushing you can smooth out the end result even more.