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Cherry-picking is another way to synchronise branches, by applying specific commits from one branch onto another.

Unlike merging or rebasing — which bring over all changes since the branches diverged — cherry-picking lets you choose individual commits and apply just those, one at a time, to your current branch. This is useful when you want to bring over a bug fix or a small feature from another branch without merging the entire branch history.

Because cherry-picking copies only the chosen commits, it creates new commits on your branch with the same changes but different SHA values.

Suppose we have the following revision graph, and we want to bring over the changes introduced in m3 (in the master branch) onto the feature branch.

gitGraph
    %%{init: { 'theme': 'default', 'gitGraph': {'mainBranchName': 'master'}} }%%
    commit id: "m1"
    branch feature
    checkout feature
    commit id: "f1"
    checkout master
    commit id: "m2"
    commit id: "m3" type: HIGHLIGHT
    commit id: "[master] m4"
    checkout feature
    commit id: "[HEAD → feature] f2"

After cherry-picking m3 onto the feature branch, the revision graph should look like the following:

gitGraph
%%{init: { 'theme': 'default', 'gitGraph': {'mainBranchName': 'master'}} }%%
    commit id: "m1"
    branch feature
    checkout feature
    commit id: "f1"
    checkout master
    commit id: "m2"
    commit id: "m3" type: HIGHLIGHT
    commit id: "[master] m4"
    checkout feature
    commit id: "f3"
    commit id: "[HEAD → feature] m3a" type: HIGHLIGHT

Note how it makes the changes done in m3 available (from now on) in the feature branch, with minimal changes to the revison graph.
Also note that the new commit m3a contains the same changes as m3, but it will a different Git object with a different SHA value.

Cherry-picking is another Git operation that can result in conflicts i.e., if the changes in the cherry-picked commit conflicts with the changes in the receiving branch.