Inpainting, Healing and Blemish brushes not working as expected

[wee lassie]

Yesterday 31 July 2019, I bought Affinity Photo 1.7.1 to use on my laptop with Windows 10. I still use Internet Explorer but installed Google Chrome today as you don´t support IE now. IE is not uninstalled.  Is this important?  I use Lightroom for all post-processing but was not satisfied with the Spot Removal tool therefore I bought AP as the Inpainting feature sounded as if it was the answer to erasing objects cleanly and easily.  I have spent most of today trying out the Inpainting, Healing and Blemish removal brushes with very little success.  I imported one dng and one jpg copy from Lightroom just to test the feature, but I am frustrated at the results.  The Inpainting works at the beginning, erasing an object surrounded by sky, but when I paint over the object that is touching a metal object, Inpainting chooses to add part of the metal instead of erasing it, no matter how many times I go over the same part, until I need to delete the last tries with CTRL Z.  It has not given a clean image as I expected.  While trying the Healing brush, nothing happens after turning it on and dragging over the image. No red mask area shows.  I tried the Blemish brush over large spots on the other image due to water drops on the lens which made the spots lighter than the surrounding area, like mist.  Here, the brushes had the exact opposite effect I wanted, i.e. they chose to insert more sky instead of removing the mist to darken the underlying tree.   Any ideas what I am doing wrong?  Until I can get this to work, AP is no better than Lightroom´s Spot removal. The upload of the first photo of 7.6 mb failed.

[Callum]

Hi wee lassie,

I think the tools you have mentioned would be unsuitable for removing the light spots of your  image. I would recommend using our selection tools to select the spots and then experiment with our adjustment layers such as brightness and contrast to see if you can make them less visible.

Thanks

C

[wee lassie]

Many thanks for the quick reply and suggestions - I´ll try them out and let you know the result! / Marina

[wee lassie]

Hi Callum,

I first added a layer then used the selection brush to ring in the spots with the marching ants, then changed over to Develop Persona and used the sliders for Exposure, Brightness and Contrast to see if there was any effect.  Absolutely nothing happens, no matter if the sliders were pushed all the way to the left or right.  I really don´t understand what I am doing wrong, as I use Lightroom without much trouble.

Do I need to uninstall Internet Explorer and make Google Chrome my default browser to be able to use Affinity Photo? Would it interfere with AP photo processing if I continue to use IE?

Marina

[Alfred]

8 minutes ago, wee lassie said:

I first added a layer then used the selection brush to ring in the spots with the marching ants, then changed over to Develop Persona and used the sliders for Exposure, Brightness and Contrast to see if there was any effect.

It sounds as though you’re trying to make changes to an empty layer. What happens if you don’t first add a layer, or (perhaps better, since it makes it easier to revert to the original image if necessary) if you duplicate the base layer?

By the way, Marina, I don’t understand your reference to IE being unsupported. Your choice of web browser shouldn’t be relevant here.

P.S. Beautiful photo!

[wee lassie]

Thanks Alfred, you were right about working without a layer.  I chose  the selection brush in Photo as it doesn´t show up directly in Develop mode then changed over and adjusted the Exposure (or was it the Brightness?). There was a definite  improvement although the paler circles are still visible.  It is going to take me some time to be able to use AP satisfactorily with the help of the tutorials.  In the meantime, I´m going to try the Dehaze locally in Lightroom to see if that helps.  Will report back later.

Thanks, Marina

[wee lassie]

Hi Callum and Alfred,

Just to let you know that I spent a couple of hours last night experimenting on Lightroom with masking the spots using the Adjustment Brush then choosing Custom and finally deciding on the Dodge (lighten) and Burn (darken) options. I got an acceptable fix for this photo.  The blemish on the mountains is still visible but much less so, while the 2 spots on the top and left hand branch of the tree are acceptably reduced.  I´ll go back to Affinity and use the selection brush to try using the same process.  That was one problem fixed - I still need to master the Healing Brush and Inpainting tool on the other photo.

Thanks, Marina