Wow! I couldn't tell what you had changed until I looked at the original. Good work, the side effect of the clone tool just looks like dust.
thats pretty good, i was expecting you to screw something up with the shadows, but you did it pretty well
No, I still screwed something up in the shadows. I'm looking at a rape charge right now. Does anybody have pointers on how to make the cloned areas a little less obvious?
Well, I don't think you resample often enough. You really should try and pull in samples from all over the screen, and should not be afraid to resample after just painting over a few pixels. Also, definitely use a soft-edged brush, because that way it transitions seamlessly from cloned material to the stock. Another thing that is important is to use the healing and spot healing brushes frequently, so that the lighting and texture matches. My preferred strategy when using the clone tool is to duplicate the stock, then clone, heal, spot heal, burn/dodge if absolutely necessary, sharpen, then duplicate the current layer. Repeat until you finish. That way, if anything looks bad at the end, you can easily retrace your steps back to the original and see what went wrong.
+1. Also, you will want to almost ALWAYS resample from as close to the place you're fixing as you can.