You better get inpaint while stock lasts

[asik1]

https://www.giveawayoftheday.com/inpaint-7/

[Ken Berry]

Asik -- since that is a program for still images, I have moved it from the VideoStudio forum to PaintShop Pro. More people there might be interested in it.

[hartpaul]

Just tested with an image that was difficult even in Photoshop. Fantastic. Much better then Magic Fill in PSP Very Impressed . Thanks for that asik1

[JoeB]

Just tested with an image that was difficult even in Photoshop. Fantastic. Much better then Magic Fill in PSP Very Impressed . Thanks for that asik1

Is it an image you could post here, letting us know what you removed? I know I can test with my own images but thought it would be a better comparison using one that somebody had already experimented with and had success. I ask because the reviews I've read said it worked well on simple replacements but not so good in complicated background situations.

[hartpaul]

This image , remove the stump in the middle. It is made difficult because the water in the background is a soft gradient.
Previously I could only get a good result by using the Blemish Fixer tool in the Makeover tools section and replacing small parts at a time.

[Ken Berry]

Ah well, easy come, easy go. I sent for it yesterday, and asked for the link to be sent to my email account rather than clog up Facebook with yet more promotions. But nothing ever arrived -- and yes, I checked the spam folder!

[JoeB]

Ah well, easy come, easy go. I sent for it yesterday, and asked for the link to be sent to my email account rather than clog up Facebook with yet more promotions. But nothing ever arrived -- and yes, I checked the spam folder!

Like you I asked for the link sent to my email account and it showed up within the hour or faster. Maybe their server just got overloaded with requests that they couldn't process all of them in time. More likely they ran out of free stock.

[JoeB]

This image , remove the stump in the middle. It is made difficult because the water in the background is a soft gradient.
Previously I could only get a good result by using the Blemish Fixer tool in the Makeover tools section and replacing small parts at a time.

Thanks! I'll give it a try.

[JoeB]

I have just tested Inpaint compared to PSP 2018 Magic Fill using @hartpaul's image and have attached the results. In doing so, and with both programs, I followed these steps:

1) Using PSP's Point-to-Point selection I first selected the stump in the middle of the image, including the shadow and root extending to the left of the stump then hit Magic Fill. In Inpaint I used the red mask at the default brush size setting to select the same parts of the image, then Edit>Inpaint.

2) In PSP I then selected the stumps at the right of the image, including the bit of water showing between the stumps and just the top of the high grasses against the stumps to make sure I got the dark areas of stump showing through them, and hit Magic Fill. In Inpaint I used the mask brush to paint the same areas and then Edit>Inpaint.

My conclusion: At a casual glance I don't see much difference to choose from between the two results. However (and it could just be me), looking closely at the center area of water that had been originally covered by the center stump, it seems to me that the water gradation transition in the PSP image is just slightly smoother than that in the Inpaint result. It is possible, however, that using either image editor and repeating the steps might show that you get a slightly different result each time. And it's not as if there appears to be any really great difference that I see.

And I'm not sure why @hartpaul seemed to have such a problem with PSP's Magic Fill on that center stump because, as seen from my example, it seemed to do an excellent job with just one selection, as it also did with the stumps on the right. Inpaint did not, in my test, work much better at all than PSP as @hartpaul seemed to suggest that it did. The only benefit I saw with Inpaint on this image is that it's faster painting with the mask brush in Inpaint than it is to complete the full selections I did using PSP.

It is possible that, on different images with different backgrounds, one tool might do better than the other, so for the time being I am going to use a script to invoke Inpaint from within PSP as a plugin and, as time permits, do more comparisons. [EDIT: Inpaint works very fast and smoothly invoked as a plugin to PSP 2018 64bit. ] If I find anything worthwhile I'll post again.

EDIT: I should mention that Inpaint has both a freehand lasso tool and a polygon (point-to-point) tool as well as a brush to select your items. It also displays the area that will be used to donate to the fill, and you can use the Donor (green) brush to add or subtract from the donor area that it selects automatically depending on what you have marked as the area to be filled. That could prove quite useful in some complicated images, but I haven't tried it out yet to compare to how it might be better than PSP or not on complicated images.

The top image is PSP Magic Fill. The one beneath it is Inpaint. Click each image to view full size.

[hartpaul]

OK here are the results I obtained . I used different methods of selecting the area to remove and then the magic fill . I cropped to the area where the replacement was made.

Rectangular selection

The result of Magic Fill: the gradient was not supported well.

Point to Point Selection

And the result of Magic Fill : gradient well done but some artifacts at edges

[hartpaul]

Further results:
Freehand Selection .

Result with Magic Fill : gradients errors and an artifact.

Inpaint 7: Area selected quickly

Result: gradient well handled but some artifacts

[hartpaul]

Lastly a more careful selection with Inpaint 7

And the result - best yet with what appears as one artifact.

As pointed out this was a difficult one as there is a gradient darkening from right to left and from top to bottom. If magic fill just samples from areas outside the image it would need to darken or lighten what it places in the stump area. It cannot be a direct clone.

[JoeB]

OK here are the results I obtained . I used different methods of selecting the area to remove and then the magic fill . I cropped to the area where the replacement was made.

But what do you see when you compare the two images I posted? And while I don't know what difference it might make, I also selected - along with the stump - the shadow thrown by the stump to the left of the stump in both cases, because if I was doing a fill I'd definitely want to also remove that shadow area. That should make the procedure more difficult given that there is more area - and of different dimension and surrounded by different textures rather than being mostly rectangular - to cover and fill. But on the other hand, perhaps you're getting more gradient issues because that dark shadow area is included in the donor area being used for fill, whereas if also selected with the main stump it is excluded as donor material. So perhaps selecting that whole stump and it's shadow helps the procedure.

[hartpaul]

As mentioned my main concern was with the difficult gradient. Shadow in grass are easy to clone out. Admittedly my crops were from a larger image I worked on - 4300 pixels on longest side but I was able to take your PSP result and scale it up and crop it.
What I see there:

Have marked in red dots where there are failures in the gradient and one artifact. As pointed out Inpaint seems to do in both cases I did, a better result with a gradient than PSP.
I note in your sample using Inpaint that there were some failures in the water close to the grass using inpaint, perhaps because you also selected the shadow.
In all my cases I am trying to get that uninterrupted gradient first and worry about the shadow and grassed area later.

[JoeB]

As mentioned my main concern was with the difficult gradient. Shadow in grass are easy to clone out. Admittedly my crops were from a larger image I worked on - 4300 pixels on longest side but I was able to take your PSP result and scale it up and crop it.

Scaled (as in zoomed and taken screenshots) or upsized 500%? Not that this makes too much difference because I have done both, with the original I worked with, the Magic Fill result, and the InPaint result.But it's late, I have a video to watch, and so will post my results tomorrow.