If you can master the Patch Tool, you will never look at the Cloning (Rubber Stamp) tool the same way. This tool is different from the other healing tools in that you first select the area to retouch and then find the part of the image to replace it. With its ability to blend pixels from the source selection and the destination selection, seamless skin repairs are easy and moving entire elements in a photograph is a snap. Larger areas can be replaced and repaired with a good portion of an image.

Never Look Back at the Clone Stamp Tool 

The Healing Brush Tool acts like a brush, whereas the Patch tool works like one of the Lasso Tools. The patch tool will try to correct lighting, shading, and texture.

1. The Patch tool is hiding under the Healing Brush tool. Click on the healing brush tool icon and hold your mouse button down until you see a new menu pop up. From the Toolbox, click the Patch tool or Click J or Shift-J. 
2. The Patch tool will show a different control panel compared to the other tools. The tool will appear like this 
   

   Source:

   Drag the selection to an area where you want the pixels to blend with your original selection. The selected portion acts as the source image, in which you can move to the required destinations without affecting the original image.

   Destination:

   This option allows you to copy the source image to the desired location chosen. Drag the pixels to your chosen destination. 

   Transparent:

   Select this option, the background portion will not be affected by patching the source.

   Diffusion:

   Controls how quickly the pasted region adapts to the surrounding image. As a general guideline, low slider values are useful for images with grain or fine details, whereas high values are useful for smooth images.

   For this example, I am going to select Source:

3. Drag a marquee selection around the area to be fix. The “marching ants” should appear like below optional: Shift-drag to add to the selection or Alt-drag/Option-drag to subtract from it. Or start again by clicking anywhere on the image except for the inside of the “marching ants” selection.
   
4. Move the patch tool inside the “marching ants” selection.
   
5. Click and hold the mouse. Drag from the inside of the selection to the area to be sampled from.
   
6. Release the mouse, and parts of the image from the sampled area will appear within the first selection. Deselect Ctrl/Cmd-D.
   

Note: You may get unfavourable results with the sampled area—the patch tool will try to correct lighting, shading and texture. This is where the Content-Aware Move Tool comes in to play.

Check out the online tutorial video for this post.