Daniel Falk wrote:

I'm afraid that I committed a little faux pas by prematurely posting this as a bug, but I was told to discuss the idea in the mailing list for the devs to decide whether they want to implement it.

Here's the idea (as posted in my bug) what do you think?

Photoshop's patch tool is very effective for larger areas that need "healing".
This is a request for a similar tool to be added to the Gimp.

Patching works like this. The user selects the blemish and with the patch tool selected drags that selection to a source region that will replace what had been selected. Of course more than just a replace, it is a sort of blended replace that seems to resemble the way the healing brush would blend.

Also as the user is dragging that selection to find a good area to clone from, the originally selected region updates with a somewhat blended view as a sort of preview. I say "somewhat" because I think it's a quicker algorithm that manages to update without taxing the cpu significantly. When the mouse button is release, the blend completes.

Please see the reference video for a good example of how the tool works.

http://video.about.com/graphicssoft/The-Patch-Tool.htm

Hello

That looks like a good way to patch images to me. Judging from the vide the preview seems to be simply a "copy-paste" of the area that will be used to patch.

Since I think the algorithm used is the same as for the Healing Tool, implementing this tool should be rather easy. Would probably make sense to let gui.gimp.org study the details of how to make this tool as usable as possible, though the way Photoshop does it looks pretty optimal to me.

Let's hope someone finds the time to look more into this.

- Martin Nordholts