Healing Brush v InPainting v Clone Tool

[MrPArtTeacher]

Can someone give me a good difference between them all.

Is this more or less right....

Healing Brush samples area that you choose to create the new fill.

Clone you choose the specific and direct area that you choose. So its literally a clone of the chosen area.

InPainting it just does a sampling of what is in the area and makes a guess on what it should be replaced with?

 

Thanks in advance

[Fixx]

Clone does not try to match new painted material to what lies underneath and if you use soft brush (feather) it will soften out the original texture (in brush border area). IMHO.

[firstdefence]

You can also inpaint with a selection from (main menu at the top of the affinity app) Edit > Inpaint

With the inpainting brush you can have blur problems near high contrast areas, using the  > inpaint option can help mitigate that issue because by using refine selection you can feather parts of the selection and keep other area's sharp.

 

[carl123]

In its basic interpretation Cloning is when you are making an exact copy of part of an image to use elsewhere on the same image but it can also be used to copy part of one image onto another, either from within the same document (e.g. different layers) or even from another, totally unrelated, document.  

The Healing Brush is basically the same as cloning but it performs further processing on what is copied in an attempt to automatically blend it into the target area so that the copied part looks more natural on the target document. 

For example, if you simply cloned a patch of dark green grass from one part of an image to another part that had light green grass the dark grass could look out of place amongst the light grass but if you used the healing brush instead of the clone tool then the healing brush would detect the difference between the dark grass being copied and the light grass you are copying it to and would adjust the copied dark grass to a lighter shade of green in an attempt to better blend it into the document.

Inpainting is primarily used to remove (erase) unwanted objects (or blemishes etc) from an image and to then "paint" in the erased part in a way that makes the image look natural and like it was always like that.  It does this by analyzing the pixel content that was originally surrounding the removed object and then adding similar pixels to the erased area so that the newly added pixel content fits seamlessly into the original image in a way designed to make the image look like it never ever contained the now erased part when the image was initially taken. 

Inpainting is useful for such things as removing animals/people/cars etc from an image that may otherwise distract from the main focus of an image. E.g. a stunning landscape or a historical building. 

Inpainting can also be used just to fill in certain parts of an image that were originally erased by another process. E.g. if you rotate an image to straighten it you will be left with transparent areas around the edge of the image which you can then use the Inpainting tool on to fill in the transparent areas with pixel content that closely matches the surrounding content 

All the above tools have their limitations but they also have additional settings & controls that can be used to assist or add to their functionality in performing certain tasks.

For certain simple tasks picking any one of the above tools will perform want it to do but for other more difficult tasks, one tool will be better suited than another to get the desired result.

Which tool you ultimately decide to use will come from experience and an understanding of what each tool is most suited for and the task in hand.

[MrPArtTeacher]

Thank you Carl, that is what I was looking for.....

[jeffers]

A simple concise explaination without getting too technical.....much appreciated