In the newer versions of Photoshop Elements there is an option for the Healing Brush and Clone Stamp tools that drives me crazy! This may be due to the fact that I don’t embrace change easily (I admit it) or you may not like it too. If you’re not a fan of the overlay option I’ll show you how to turn it off.
If you’re not even sure what I’m talking about I’ll show you an example!
When using the Healing Brush or Clone Stamp tool to sample (copy) a specific area the brush displays the sampled area. In this example, I sampled (copied) my grandson’s eye. Now as I move my cursor around I can see his eye….this bugs me but you may like it!
I prefer to see a blank brush while using the Clone Stamp tool and the Healing Brush tool as shown in the example below. You can 
work with both options and see which one you like better.
To turn off the overlay which is the default setting, click on the area on the Options bar shown circled to display the drop down box.
Uncheck the box that says Show Overlay. 
To turn the overlay back on, check the box again.
P.S. No babies were harmed in making this tutorial! He already had the owie before I wrote this tutorial!
To download this tutorial as a printable pdf click here.
Thank you, thank you for showing us how to turn off the blasted overlay option! That bugged the heck out of me but I hadn’t taken the time to figure out how to get rid of it. Sometimes when changes come about I just accept them as that’s just the way it is. Is this case, I’m glad I was wrong.
I used the Clone Stamp for the first time a couple of weeks ago and it worked on what I was doing and loved it. I wasn’t trying to do something on a face so this will be a great help. Thank you so much!
OMG! Thank you so much for this tip! It was driving me crazy and so I went back to using PSE 7 because of that and the fact that they put the trash can and new layer at the bottom of the layers palette!
Hi Ginny!
I can relate!Yes the trashcan drove me nuts for awhile too but one of the big problems was that people were dragging their layer styles into the trashcan and deleting them….what a pain that was.
Thanks so much. I was working on a new desktop just last week, and could not understand why a piece of a mountain in my picture kept appearing when using the Clone Stamp. Your tips are always so helpful. Keep them coming even if your touring is coming to an end.