DDW

You guys are AMAZING!!!  Thank you so much!  What a great community.
 
I figured out my problem.  Correct me if I am wrong.
 
1st grader comes up to the teacher:  "Mrs. Jones, I want you to teach me math please."
 
"Well . . . that is great DDW!   Math covers a lot of areas."                                                     "Calculus or Trigonometry.  Either would be fine!"
"But DDW, you cannot count to 20 yet.  How about we work on that first?!"
 
BIG GRIN!

Hi DDW,
I did see the part of the video you wanted us to see and I do understand that is a more complex photo. The example I gave was more for a general understanding of how it works. It may not look it, but there is indeed a pattern in the painted areas of that image the lady painted on. And if you don't look at the image as a whole, but each element separately, you will begin to see a pattern.
 

 
With the telephone pole, the background is symmetrical on both sides. The bushy area on the bottom left could've been a problem, but it is not actually hitting it. And the height of the trees and grass almost match.
 

 
On this one of the post, the background is on an angle, and in some cases, that can be tricky, but there is nothing else happening in the background. If it were object piled on object, plus the background, then that would result to a mess.
 



Now getting to your image, the giant slice of cheese that orange cone can be removed, because it is like the post example. The background is on an angle, but there is not much happening. (My version does look sloppy though). Just be careful with that, because unlike the post example, the shadow does not fill up the remaining bottom area.
 

 
Okay now this is a hard thing to edit, and I am sorry to say, I do not have those skills. Imagine trying to get your daughter's arm to connect. There is a vertical part of the arm trying to merge with the horizontal part. And say it did merge, it would have to also calculate the shape of the elbow which would have to be round, but there would be no way of knowing.
 

 
For this operation, the Clone Tool works much better. My example may look sloppy, but I did what I could. It's that arm that's getting in the way.
 

To export a JPEG, go File > Export  and this panel will appear
 
The yellow box is the physical size of the image. The smaller the image size, the smaller the file size.
You can enter a size of about 800, that is big enough for what we need,
 
If you drag the slider (Red box) that affects the (quality) or compression and therefore file size. Don't go lower than 75 . 
 
The green box shows what the file size will be on the disc. As you drag the slider, it changes.
 
 
So ...
enter 800 in the size (left hand box)  
drag the slider
the estimated file size will tell you what the file size will be.
Click on Export to save it.

 
p.s. Get well soon 

1.5.2.69
 
I have never had any problems or found any bugs
 
Never believe what you read on the 'net 

With my UK keyboard, I can resize the Inpainting Brush Tool brush with the same [ and ] shortcuts that work for any other brush.
 

Hello DDW. First of all, get well. It's no good being ill.
 
Secondly, you are correct that inpainting is a tool to remove unwanted areas, but it works best on more simple backgrounds. From your description (unable to view the links), you are looking to remove areas of more complexity. It all depends on the object's surroundings. Let's say there is an image of a bird flying in a blue cloud-less sky. The bird's surroundings is a solid blue, so when you paint over it, the program detects the inbetween. It takes whatever borders around the painted region and merges it. In this case, you would get a clean result. However, if the bird was in front of a cloud, then the result would look blurry; as it did in your case.
 
And I don't know how the lady changed her brush size. It looks like a key command was used, but I do not know it. I always change the size the way Toltec mentioned.

I’ve attached a ZIP file with an .afphoto file enclosed. The “background” layer is your original picture. There are a bunch of other layers, all of which are turned off (the check box on the right side of each layer in the Layers panel). You should start at the bottom and turn on each of the layers to see the progression of things. The first 5 layers (the 5 above the background) involve taking pieces of the picture OUT. For the most part, this was done either with Inpainting or with Cloning. Mostly, cloning. For any inpainting or cloning operation, I chose “Current Layer and Below” and made multiple passes to get rid of the offending element(s). The hardness of the cloning brush was generally set really low, so as to blend the layers. The hardness of the Inpainting brush was usually set to 100%, since that’s how I’ve found it works best.
After that, it was a matter of recreating the missing parts of your daughter. Once the cheerleader in front of her is removed, there are large chunks of her legs, waist, and left arm missing. To do this, I copied generously from the other girls in the picture.
First, I grabbed the left chest wall border from the girl on the right side of the picture. Copied and pasted into a new layer. Masked out everything but the border of the shirt. Used the Move tool to stretch it a bit horizontally. Blurred the edges to make it blend in.
Also copied the left thigh, hip, and inner legs from the girl at the left. Pasted into 2 new layers and masked out everything I didn’t want. Blurred the borders. Used the Move tool to stretch the layers to the proper curvature.
The Left Arm was the hardest. I copied the upper arm from the girl at the lower left corner of the picture, and copied the forearm from the girl at the right. I pasted both into new layers, and flipped the forearm horizontally to make sure it was facing the right direction. Rotated both and stretched them to fit. Blurred the edges. Masked as needed. Did a merge selected to make the arm into a single pixel layer. Still very rough, as you can see.

Cheerleaders.afphoto.zip

Well, this is the best I can do, not perfect though.
 
I don't know how to start explaining it. A mixture of cloning, inpainting, blurring, liquifying and so on.
 
Quite a challenge, getting rid of the unwanted stuff was easy. It was creating her arm that was hard.

 

Well done!

Hi @DDW. Welcome to the forum! 
 
Affinity Photo is a powerful, feature-rich app. If you are new to it, I suggest starting off by watching the Beginners Series of official Affinity video tutorials listed here. This should answer some of your questions & get you familiar with the basics of how it works. Then you can browse through the other, more specialized videos like those listed in the Retouching section, for example the Inpainting one.
 
The inpainting tool usually works best if you paint over smaller areas containing things you want to remove with just a bit of the surrounding area included. You may also need to make several passes to remove any leftover unwanted stuff. In the Affinity inpainting video, you can see this clearly at around the 4:00 mark, where James removes the person with the red jacket behind the tree by applying the brush several times.
 
However, it also depends on the surrounding area -- when it has strong textural & structural elements the inpainting algorithm can identify, you can increase the area & still get good results. If you are curious about what that means, this section of the Wikipedia Inpainting article discusses some of the technical detail about that, but to get a feel for how it works in real world use there is no substitute for practice & experimentation. This is true for all retouching techniques -- it is an acquired skill.
 
Regarding the "Current Layer & Below" option, as in the live session video you can use that to do your inpainting on a new pixel layer. As the name suggests, it samples from both that layer & all those visible below it, but it still adds the inpainted pixels to the selected layer. This is non-destructive because, as in the video, you can switch on & off that layer to reveal the untouched pixels below it.

Select the Inpainting Brush tool.
 
Note that the Inpainting Brush tool  is part of the healing brush group (plaster). Click on the plaster and the group of tools will pop-out. (picture). Click on the Inpainting tool.

 
To set the size of the brush, on the toolbar above the window
 

 
click on the little down arrow to the right, and drag the slider that appears to adjust the brush, or you can click where is says 64 px and enter a new size, like 128  to double the size. You don't need to enter the "px"
 
As an example ...
 
To remove the post, 

 
Set the brush to a sensible size and paint over the post. Try 60  but it depends on the size of your picture!

 
Release the mouse, and it's gone.