Newbie Q: How to pipe cloned area by itself

Hey all, trying to get more into fusion. I need to do some cloning on a shot and am wondering if there is a way that I can pipe just the area that I cloned out of the paint node and into the next node?

I believe you can if alpha in the cloned areas is also painted to 1.0 and is set to 0.0 elsewhere.

Since I am cloning from an area with full alpha already the subsequent cloned area is also full. Is there a way to change so that the cloned area has an inverted alpha? Or are you saying that I should also paint the alpha separately?

To use Igor's method, you'd use a ChannelBooleans to clear the alpha from the plate prior to painting. Just remember to send your plate downstream from a point before the ChannelBooleans.

Another method would be to feed the Paint node a black transparent Background on its input. When you switch to Clone mode, a field called Clone Source Tool will appear. Drag your source image to that field. The Paint tool will now read from that image for the purposes of cloning but will output only the paint strokes. For feedback while painting, just Merge the Paint over your source and view the Merge.

Incidentally, the use of the Clone Source Tool field is necessary if you want to paint with a frame offset, even if you don't want to use this paint-strokes-only output method.

Bryan, thank you that worked great (and I never in a million years would have found that).

A (hopefully) quick follow up question on that. I want to isolate the clone because I want to put color correction on it before merging back to the original plate. When I do the "black transparent" method and place a ColorCorrector node after it, my semi-transparent area's are affected more by the CC than the opaque areas and I get a weird halo around my cloned area. Any idea what is happening here?

You need to check the pre/post multiply checkbox in the 3rd or 4th tab of the color corrector to solve this.