InPainting

Description

Inpainting algorithms are used to fill in parts of images in a natural-looking way. Typically this can be used for restoration (damaged or torn images for instance), or to remove unwanted objects in a photograph, or other similar use cases.

The closer we have currently in GIMP are the clone and heal tools, though an inpainting tool try to be “smarter” than these, using more of the context, and not just copying a source. Workflow-wise, it can often be used for bigger pieces of images (then the clone/heal tools may be used for finishing).

See this tutorial by Patrick David using “Heal Selection” from Resynthesizer plug-in, with some nice photos in it, to understand the feature.

References

Several inpainting algorithms are considered right now for a future inpainting tool, which would be similar to a “Patch tool” or “Content Aware Fill” in Photoshop apparently.

Note that while this feature appeared in 2010 in Photoshop (supposedly for CS5, according to a web search), a Free Software plug-in for GIMP has existed since 2003 and is quite performant: Resynthesizer.

Resynthesizer’s algorithm is based on a thesis by Paul Francis Harrison (the plug-in itself was apparently part of the thesis):

• “Image Texture Tools” by Paul Francis Harrison.
• Backup on our download server

An alternative algorithm could be to improve the "gegl:alpha-inpaint" workshop operation (see file operations/workshop/alpha-inpaint.c in GEGL codebase).