In Painting Inconsistency

[metoymi]

I am running Affinity Photo 1.6.7 on an Apple Macbook Pro with OS 10.14 (Mojave). I have used the In Painting tool with some success to remove people and objects from photos. However, the tool is not consistent. Sometimes it removes the object rather cleanly. But other times it creates a blur even if I go back over the same spot. One particular case that is really annoying is that I am trying to remove a man next to lady since the man has nothing to do with the lady subject. Instead of removing the man, In Painting copies part of the lady and paints her in to where the man was. I have tried this several times with the same result. I do not save the painted image. I just reload the original and try again. Is there a more recent version of Affinity Photo than 1.6.7?

[Dan C]

Hi metoymi,

Welcome to the forums

This isn't a bug as such and so I'll move this thread to our Questions section of the forums. The inpainting tool works by analysing the pixels surrounding the area where you've used the inpainting brush and copies pixel data from these areas to paint over the area you're trying to remove. This means that if the surrounding data is blurry, where you've used the inpainting tool will also be blurry, the same goes for your man and woman example, when trying to remove the man the inpainting tool will use the pixel data surrounding the area, which is the woman. Painting over the same spot multiple times with the inpainting tool is likely to cause a blurriness, as the surrounding pixels are replicated and blended multiple times. A bit like mixing multiple paint colours over and over, eventually you'll end up with the same murky brown/black (not a perfect analogy, but hopefully this makes sense!)

The below comment by R C-R provides some explanation of the inpainting tool as well as a useful link which provides a more technical description;

Unfortunately the tool isn't magic and must use local data in the image which means the inpainting tool is not always a 'fix all' solution, or necessarily the best tool. I'd recommend trying the clone tool, as this can provide cleaner and more controlled results.