I have seen this a few times.

First, in this case which was pretty simple, I used no layers.

I had a lamp post at night, background pretty dark, some shrub branches, pretty simple for cloning.

The lamp post was tilted (for real) and I wanted to straighten it ...

• selected the post and the lamp on top as a rectangle
  
• selected "Move" and rotated it a few degrees, leaving some small black areas around the rectangle
  
• applied the transformation
  
• went to clone over the black areas (remember, no layers) but it would not clone!
  
• saved the image (as a tiff) and re-opened it and cloning was just fine
  

----
Dennis Smith.

1. In your original, did you have the photo as a smart object? I'm not on my main computer now, but I don't think you can clone on a smart object layer.

2. In your procedure, did you consider or try Adaptive Wide-angle Filter instead?

Regards, Antero

>1. In your original, did you have the photo as a smart
>object? I'm not on my main computer now, but I don't think you
>can clone on a smart object layer.
No -- cloning WORKS, just won't clone over the black (empty?) areas left by rotating the rectangle. I can clone over everything AROUND the black areas.
>
>2. In your procedure, did you consider or try Adaptive
>Wide-angle Filter instead?
I haven't -- I will -- but I was more interested in the cloning not working as I expected -- and I was wondering if it might be an answer to some of the posts that have appeared here over the last year or so about cloning "not working" sometimes!
>
>Regards, Antero

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Dennis Smith.

Hi Dennis,

I don't think this is a bug or that you did anything wrong. Essentially, when you move the object on the background layer, you are creating a "hole" in your canvas, so there is nothing there upon which to "paint" with the clone brush. You might try using content-aware move instead. This should allow you to reposition the lamp post and then CS6 will fill in the blank spaces.

Karen

Visit my Nikonians gallery.

Interesting that save and re-load changes that so now I CAN clone.

I save as PSD or TIFF (forget which, I was using TIFF until a few days ago, switched to PSD -- so could be either right now -- I will check when I get home).

----
Dennis Smith.

Solved ... a bit stupid on my part -- not paying attention to what is happening.

My steps were ...

• rectangular selection around the lamp
  
• select move tool
  
• rotate selection
  
• Ctrl/D -- which was ignored becuase I had not OK'ed the move yet
  
• Ctrl/H -- hid the selection because Ctrl/D did not seem to .. that was my problem
  
• Select CLONE tool -- which asked if I wanted to OK the move -- said YES
  
• at THIS point the selection is still in place but invisible because of the CTRL/H, so clone is is only working INSIDE the invisible selection.
  

----
Dennis Smith.