Camera Labs

Just to let you know that today on GOTD ( www.giveawayoftheday.com ) you can download a utility named "InPaint" with which you can remove offending objects from your images with very little effort. It does a fairly decent job and you can tweak the result additionally in your favourite photo editor.

It's user interface is a bit too simple, like not being able to resize the 'open' window, but for a gift horse...

Only available until tomorrow 13-7-2010 8:00 UTC DST.

Enjoy.

Ben
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When in doubt..... Press the shutter.

Downloaded and tried it... getting mixed results. As far as I can tell, the software blends from left and right, regardless of the area you select. This is great for vertical obstructions, but hopeless at horizontal ones. Unless I'm doing something totally silly that is...

Edit: ok, you can adjust the sampling area by holding down shift and moving the selection box around, even far from the fill area. However each new selection still defaults to using the left and right of the fill area.

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Canon DSLRs: 7D, 5D2, 1D, 600D, 450D full spectrum, 300D IR mod
Lenses: EF 35/2, 50/1.8, 85/1.8, 135/2+SF, 28-80 V, 70-300L, 100-400L, TS-E 24/3.5L, MP-E 65, EF-S 15-85 IS
3rd party: Zeiss 2/50 makro, Samyang 8mm fisheye, Sigma 150 macro, 120-300 f/2.8 OS, Celestron 1325/13
Tinies: Sony HX9V.

Hi Ben,

Thanks for the link. To save confusion, as the offer for InPaint has now expired, I've renamed the thread which can now be used to comment on how good or bad the software is. If you can think of a better thread title please feel free to change it again.

Bob.

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OM-D E-M5 + ED 12-50mm, H-PS14042E, H-F007014E, L-RS014150E, M.ZUIKO DIGITAL 45mm 1:1.8.
Gitzo GT1541T, Arca-Swiss Z1 DP ball-head.
Astrophotography: TEC 140 'scope, FLI ML16803 camera, ASA DDM60 Pro mount.

I've only tried it on two photos and got mixed results too. I drew a rectangle around a power line and it made it worse. The line was mostly still there but it had vertical smudges all over it. Maybe a different selection area will give better results. I'll have to try that.

On a second photo I removed a woman walking along the seashore. I drew a polygon around her and it left some water colour artefacts on the sand part and some remnants of her hair. I drew a rectangle around the first and it cleaned it up a lot. Only some blue remained on a small sandy coloured part on which I repeated the procedure. Only one more was needed to remove the hair remnant. In four simple steps it gave quite an acceptable result.

Hi Bob. The name you gave it missed a few letters at the end possibly due to name length limitations so I changed it to one that fits. Expired is a 'relative' term though.

Ben
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When in doubt..... Press the shutter.

As mentioned earlier, I had particular trouble with horizontal feature removal until I found out shift-clicking lets you move the sampling box. By default it uses sampling left and right, so that doesn't work well on long horizontal features...

For the moment this seems to be a poor man's content aware fill. A good 'shopper could clone a similar result easily enough.

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Canon DSLRs: 7D, 5D2, 1D, 600D, 450D full spectrum, 300D IR mod
Lenses: EF 35/2, 50/1.8, 85/1.8, 135/2+SF, 28-80 V, 70-300L, 100-400L, TS-E 24/3.5L, MP-E 65, EF-S 15-85 IS
3rd party: Zeiss 2/50 makro, Samyang 8mm fisheye, Sigma 150 macro, 120-300 f/2.8 OS, Celestron 1325/13
Tinies: Sony HX9V.