how many pixels should I put in 1 or 10. Is it asking for the area to act on or the quality of the clean?
This depends on how high the resoution of your scan is. The higher the the resolution the more pixels you will have to play with.
Despeckle detects the edges in an image (areas where significant color changes occur) and blurs all of the selection except those edges. This blurring removes noise while preserving detail.
Do I need to do anything else or do I then pick the cleanest bit and clone stamp it all over?
I'm not sure I understand. But you do take your sample with the clone stamp tool from an area that has a similar texture and shade as the the area you are trying to clean.
Because you can use any brush tip with the Clone Stamp tool, you have a lot of control over the size of the area you clone. You can also use opacity and flow settings in the options bar to finesse the way you apply the cloned area. You can also sample from one image and apply the clone in another image, as long as both images are in the same color mode.
When I select the area for the layers I use the brush and zoom in as much as I can, is this right?
Yes, bigger is better is the rule of thumb.
I use photoshop elements but I assume the process is similar whatever program I use.
It doesn't matter which program you use the procedure is similar in all of them. Just the names of the filters is diffrent.
