Selection brush and inpainting tool

[pdh]

After creating a selection with the selection brush I then select the Inpainting tool and it replaces the selection with a selection that isn't appropriate. How do I change what the Inpainting tool is changing to? I want it to selection the sky right above it but instead it goes elsewhere in the photo to find a replacement.

Thanks,
Pete

[Lee D]

It all depends on the patterns/pixels the algorithm the Inpainting Tool uses, the area in which it samples from can't be specified. Which is why using a combination of inpainting & other retouching tools often produces the best results.

[Alfred]

34 minutes ago, Lee D said:

the algorithm the Inpainting Tool uses, the area in which it samples from can't be specified

The ability to specify a sampling area for inpainting would be a huge improvement.

[MEB]

Hi pdh,
After creating the selection try go to menu Edit > Inpaint instead. It may still fail but i think it's worth giving it a try.

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, Alfred said:

The ability to specify a sampling area for inpainting would be a huge improvement.

Considering that inpainting typically works by looking in nearby areas for patterns to use, I think that would more often than not produce weird, terrible looking results.

[Alfred]

21 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Considering that inpainting typically works by looking in nearby areas for patterns to use, I think that would more often than not produce weird, terrible looking results.

You could obviously use such a feature to enforce terrible-looking results, but I for one would appreciate the extra degree of control it would give us. If you didn’t want to limit the source area, you could simply select the entire canvas (or make no selection at all).

Consider this scenario: you have a grassy area with scattered weeds and a pond in the middle, and you want to replace the pond with grass. When you use cloning for this, it can be tricky to avoid ending up with a repeating pattern. Inpainting has the potential to yield a more natural result, but without the ability to limit the source area you don’t have any way to tell the algorithm either to include or to exclude the weeds.

[lepr]

17 hours ago, R C-R said:

Considering that inpainting typically works by looking in nearby areas for patterns to use [...]

How ironic then that the OP is finding that the tool is choosing inappropriate distant nearby areas instead of appropriate nearby ones. I've often had the same problem and would like to be able to restrict/specify the sampling area as can be done in some other apps.

[R C-R]

If the intent is to have greater control of the sample area & how it is applied to the target area, why not use one of the other retouching tools designed for that? If needed, it can be finished off with the Inpainting tool to remove repeating patterns & such.

[lepr]

53 minutes ago, R C-R said:

If the intent is to have greater control of the sample area & how it is applied to the target area, why not use one of the other retouching tools designed for that? If needed, it can be finished off with the Inpainting tool to remove repeating patterns & such.

So you suggest using the Inpainting Tool as a final stage in working around a problem that's in the Inpainting Tool. LOL.

[pdh]

Actually it is replacing the selection with things right near it. 

What other tools would anyone suggest? Guess I could Clone but the results haven't been that good. Same with the healing tool.

 

[Move Along People]

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[pdh]

 

 

 

 

trying to replace the foliage behind the riders with sky.

thanks

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Move Along People]

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[Old Bruce]

I would check to see if I had a picture with more sky, and similar sky at that, and put that picture in the photo (Copy and paste as a new layer) to use as a source for the clone tool.

[AffinityJules]

Many ways in which to do this type of thing and, the level of what looks like perlin noise helps out a bit.

1. I used the pen tool to outline the area around the heads and backrest of the cart.

2 Made the selection/feather 2/Inverted the selection.

3. New layer set to current layer and below.

4. Cloned out the offending areas in question.

5. Flattened document.

Note: I never used the inpainting tool at all with this image because there was no call for it.

[R C-R]

4 hours ago, anon2 said:

So you suggest using the Inpainting Tool as a final stage in working around a problem that's in the Inpainting Tool. LOL.

I was simply suggesting the same thing @Lee D suggested above, which is that using a combination of retouching tools often produces the best results.

For instance, as @Alfred mentioned sometimes using the Clone Brush Tool results in obvious repeating patterns. Careful use of the Inpainting Brush Tool, particularly when applied on small areas at a time & maybe with varied opacity & hardness, often will remove enough of the pattern to eliminate what some might consider a problem with the Clone Brush Tool.

I do not consider this to be a problem with either of these or any of the other retouching tools, just a consequence of their being designed to do different things. YMMV.

[pdh]

Affinity Jules, thanks looks great. I'll try that.

Haakoo, looks good. How did you do it?

Thanks.

[lepr]

4 hours ago, R C-R said:

I was simply suggesting the same thing @Lee D suggested above, which is that using a combination of retouching tools often produces the best results.

For instance, as @Alfred mentioned sometimes using the Clone Brush Tool results in obvious repeating patterns. Careful use of the Inpainting Brush Tool, particularly when applied on small areas at a time & maybe with varied opacity & hardness, often will remove enough of the pattern to eliminate what some might consider a problem with the Clone Brush Tool.

I do not consider this to be a problem with either of these or any of the other retouching tools, just a consequence of their being designed to do different things. YMMV.

I understood the technique that you were suggesting. You still seem to not be getting the point that your suggested finishing off with Inpainting has the same problem/limitation as any other use of Inpainting: the user is currently unable to specify regions which they particularly want to include/exclude for sampling.

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, anon2 said:

You still seem to not be getting the point that your suggested finishing off with Inpainting has the same problem/limitation as any other use of Inpainting: the user is currently unable to specify regions which they particularly want to include/exclude for sampling.

Specifying regions has its own problems & limitations.

[lepr]

41 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Specifying regions has its own problems & limitations.

A compulsively negative attitude to just about every suggestion made for the software must be more problematic and limiting. Try to see the positive side for a change.

[R C-R]

Just now, anon2 said:

A compulsively negative attitude to just about every suggestion made for the software must be more problematic and limiting. Try to see the positive side for a change.

My attitude is neither negative nor positive. It is just a simple statement about the nature of retouching tools, that being that there is no one such tool that will or ever can be the right one for every retouching job. It is up to the user to learn how to use the provided ones, singly or in combination, to achieve the results they want.

For inpainting tools in particular, it will not be the same for every app that provides one or more of these tools, in part because different inpainting algorithms are optimized for different applications & use different methods to achieve them. See for example this scholarly review article for more about that, or the Digital Inpainting section of this Wikipedia article for a somewhat less scholarly discussion.

The bottom line is regardless of the algorithms used or how they are applied, there will always be limitations. Adding something like specifying sample regions will not make them go away. There is nothing negative about pointing that out. Like it or not, it is just the way it is.

[Move Along People]

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[Move Along People]

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[lepr]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

My attitude is neither negative nor positive. It is just a simple statement about the nature of retouching tools, that being that there is no one such tool that will or ever can be the right one for every retouching job. It is up to the user to learn how to use the provided ones, singly or in combination, to achieve the results they want.

For inpainting tools in particular, it will not be the same for every app that provides one or more of these tools, in part because different inpainting algorithms are optimized for different applications & use different methods to achieve them. See for example this scholarly review article for more about that, or the Digital Inpainting section of this Wikipedia article for a somewhat less scholarly discussion.

The bottom line is regardless of the algorithms used or how they are applied, there will always be limitations. Adding something like specifying sample regions will not make them go away. There is nothing negative about pointing that out. Like it or not, it is just the way it is.

Why did you go to the trouble of writing that, R C-R?

Nobody remotely suggested that a panacea for retouching would result from allowing the Affinity user to restrict the sampling region for Inpainting.

[R C-R]

21 minutes ago, haakoo said:

That's why if you zoom in with a small brush it fills the area of interest nicely.
And when trying to do big chunks in one go with a large brush it will collect to much data to fill the area and gives mixed or even bad results.

I think the way it works is the larger the target area selected, the harder it is for the algorithm to find any texture or pattern anywhere else in the image that could replace the target area without distortion or repetition. I very much doubt that adding the ability to choose the area to sample from would improve that because it would just increase the amount of distortion or repetition the algorithm could use as a replacement.