[Digikam-users] Inpainting filter

[Jean-François Rabasse]

Hi Anders and Carl,

Some comments from my personal experience.
(I happen to do inpainting and I use both Krita and Gimp, depending on
what I want to do.)

On Wed, 11 Dec 2013, Anders Lund wrote:

> I believe the idea behind inpainting is something like the healing brush 
> in krita (or that other image editing app out) - use the surroundings to 
> cover an area that sticks out, like a spot or zit or ridge.

Similar idea, but not exactly the same processing. The healing brush in
Krita is a sophisticated clone tool which take in account not only the
strict pixels under the clone reference but also some neighbour pixels
to "extrapolate" what should be cloned..
It works really well when correcting some small details as you mention,
spots, scars.

True inpainting relies on a mathematical model of an image area, that can
be used to rebuild a whole subarea, the blind spot.
It's an image synthesizer.
It will give far better results when you want to remove an unwanted area
of your image, hamburger box thrown on a lawn, unwanted person on the
background of an image, satellite tv antenna from a 18th century 
straw roofed cottage, etc.

Gimp has such a synthesizer. It's not provided by default, you have to
download and install the gimp-plugin-resynthesizer-xxxx for your Gimp
version. (And also the gimp-plugins-python-xxxx if not yet installed.)

For simple corrections (a small spot), usage is really trivial.
- select the unwanted area of your image with the free hand selector (lasso)
- activate Filters > Enhance > Heal selection
- click Ok in the dialog box and you're done

For more difficult tasks, it's worth playing with the dialog box options 
(Context sampling, Sample from, Filling order) and do some tests and tries.

Anyway, it's possible to do great things.


> I'm yet to find out how using krita will affect metadata handling.

From what I know, Krita behaves fairly with metadata.
Not Gimp. All versions have a broken XMP management and we'll have to wait
for Gimp V 3.0 to have correct handling.
The solution for Gimp users is to protect existing XMP data into sidecar
files (or Digikam DB), to be restored later into images.

Regards,
Jean-François