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Participant
March 21, 2017
Question

Alt key error with clone and healing brush tool

  • March 21, 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 6170 views

Last night as I was working in Photoshop 15 at my son's Boy Scout meeting I was blindsided by a direct hit on my hand from a soccer ball.  At that moment I was busy working with the cloning or the healing brush tool (I honestly can't remember which).  Up until that moment I was getting it - I was making power lines disappear and trash cans vanish. After my hand, that was on the mouse (which suffered a battery cover dismemberment which I quickly mended), was attacked by the soccer ball I couldn't get the clone stamp or healing brush tool to work.  When I do the Alt+click to determine the source the whole dang picture gets picked up.  The healing brush does absolutely nothing.  Best guess is that the ball either struck something on the keyboard or my finger was unknowingly forced to click on some obscure advanced setting that I will never be able to figure out.  I just bought this software and now it's useless to me.  Can anybody help?  Should I uninstall and reinstall the program?  Do you have a clue what changes were made by the dang soccer ball? (Can you hear your mom saying "Don't throw the ball in the house!"?  This is why people!)  I just did a photo shoot on Saturday and can't deliver a product the the client without a fix to this issue.

    1 reply

    hatstead
    Inspiring
    March 21, 2017

    I'll go out on a limb here. You may have depressed the bracket key next to the letter P on the keyboard. These keys change cursor size.

    ] - larger, [ - smaller. Click on [ and see what happens.

    Participant
    March 21, 2017

    Thank you for responding.  I did press the bracket keys to resize the cursor.  That was not the issue.  That function was working correctly.  What was happening was that the alt+click kept grabbing the whole image during clone stamp.  Some keystroke was initiated that I couldn't figure out.  But, your response inspired me to dig even further and I fixed my issue!

    Edit

    Preferences

    General

    Reset preferences on next launch

    Restarted the application and viola! 

    I will probably never figure out what keystroke craziness caused my issue but I'm sure glad I can clone stamp to my heart's desire again.

    Thanks!

    hatstead
    Inspiring
    March 21, 2017

    You're welcome. Glad to help.