Having trouble with Magic Fill in PSP X7

[steinerman]

I'm about ready to throw in the towel and admit defeat. I've watched the tutorial on Magic Fill until I can recite it by heart and it looks so simple and easy that any idiot should be able to erase objects in a photo. Yet when I try it, all I end up with is a colossal mess.

What I have is a photo of a friend of mine taken at our church carnival where she's wearing a off-white blouse with a nametag on the left side of her chest. I want to remove the nametag, but do you think I can do it? No way in blazes!! I've tried everything I can think of, including selecting very small pieces at a time, and nothing I do seems to give me anything near the results shown in the Corel's tutorial.

Is there anyone out there who would be willing to take a look at this photo and tell me how in blazes I can do what I want? I really want to learn how to do this but right now I'm extremely frustrated and more than a little disappointed. It shouldn't be this hard. If you would be willing to take a crack at removing this lady's nametag, please E-mail me at phydeaux99 [at] att [dot] net and I'll send you the jpg file. I just joined and the board says I'm not active enough to be able to use the PM feature.

Thanks for listening

Larry Steiner

[hartpaul]

Try making a small selection of an area of the off white shirt. Copy and paste as a new image.
IN materials palette select patterns and that shirt image should be available as a pattern. Select it and then use the paint brush tool to paint over the name tag.
You could also copy and paste as new layer and then move that part over the top of the name tahg and merge all.

[Simone Corel UK]

@steinerman

Magic Fill analyzes the area around your content and believes it has to add them for example:

This is not unusual or a bug, but normal behaviour. There are situations, when I use Magic Fill, and others when I prefer the Clone tool.
Because of the same reason, I haven't often used Content-Aware in Photoshop, the Adobe equivalent of Magic Fill.

[LeviFiction]

Adobe's Content-Aware Fill has one distinct advantage over Magic Fill in this area. If you mask out an area in the image, Content-aware fill won't use that area. So Photoshop is able to control what areas of the image are and are not used to fill things in.

There are of course other tricks you can use in PSP to control Magic Fill.

But, like Simone said, cloning is still an excellent way to go for something simple. In fact depending upon the image, what's around the name tag, you can also use other tools like the Object Remover or the blemish fixer (makeover tools).