Dan Giel wrote:

I am new to gimp and am having trouble removing unwanted objects from digital photos. I have tried CLONE, Erasure etc, but to no avail. Where can I go to find information to remove unwanted objects from pictures. Hope someone can help.

Well, the first thing to consider is that, since your graphics are digital photos they don't contain any "objects." They consist entirely of pixels in various colors.

That may be stating the obvious, but the point is that since the picture is nothing but patches of color, any (semi-)automatic retouching tool is going to define objects according to its own rules, and how well that works will depend greatly on the kind of image you have and what kind of artifacts you're trying to remove. So it would be helpful if you'd explain more specifically what you are trying to do.

But regarding the clone tool, I've always found it tremendously useful for photo retouching. What exactly happened (or failed to happen) when you tried it?

On 5/30/06, Dan Giel wrote:

Hi all,
I am new to gimp and am having trouble removing unwanted objects from digital photos. I have tried CLONE, Erasure etc, but to no avail. Where can I go to find information to remove unwanted objects from pictures. Hope someone can help.

There are lots of different ways of doing this. I would suggest learning all about masks. Using a mask makes it easy to recover a detail if you mask off more than you intended. I would also highly recommend a graphics tablet for this kind of work. Here are some tutorials - you can search for "gimp mask tutorial" to find more.

http://www.gimpguru.org/Tutorials/ReplaceForeground/ http://www.gimpguru.org/Tutorials/SimulatedDOF/

Dan Giel wrote:

Hi all,
I am new to gimp and am having trouble removing unwanted objects from digital photos. I have tried CLONE, Erasure etc, but to no avail. Where can I go to find information to remove unwanted objects from pictures. Hope someone can help.

Thanks.

Hi Dan,

There are several techniques to remove objects, mostly depending of the amount of work required and the quality desired.

1- The clone tool. It give some very good results, but requires some experience. An example (in French, sorry) can be seen at http://jlhamel.club.fr/GIMP2/index.html#Retouche (scroll down a little until you reach a section called: "Elimination de détails génants au moyen de l'outil clone" and you will see a traffic sign erased just with the clone tool).

2- The resynthesizer plugin. I never used it for object removal, but all I know is it requires some CPU power. However, it can do really extraordinary things: http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer Some articles and blogs about it:
http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/03/15/1722200 http://www.rfc1149.net/blog/2005/10/28/the-resynthesizer-miracle/ http://slacy.com/blog/index.php/2005/04/22/cool-image-processing/ A tutorial
http://www.schwarzvogel.de/resynth-tut-en.shtml A page from the old website to demonstrate the object removal with a little details:
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~pfh/resynthesizer/features.html

3- From small stuff, this thing may work: http://www.geocities.com/lode_leroy/gimp/

Well, choose what suits you best ... :)

Best regards,

Olivier.

Hi all,
I am new to gimp and am having trouble removing unwanted objects from digital photos. I have tried CLONE, Erasure etc, but to no avail. Where can I go to find information to remove unwanted objects from pictures. Hope someone can help.

Thanks.

I am new at this also, been at it for about two years, and tried doing it without any help. What I do, is use cut and paste. I blow up the area and cut sections out around in and paste them into the unwanted object takes a while but it has worked for me. Especially with exwives in pictures.LOL

Jeffrey P.

I am new to gimp and am having trouble removing unwanted objects from digital photos. I have tried CLONE, Erasure etc, but to no avail. Where can I go to find information to remove unwanted objects from pictures. Hope someone can help.

I am new at this also, been at it for about two years, and tried doing it without any help. What I do, is use cut and paste. I blow up the area and cut sections out around in and paste them into the unwanted object takes a while but it has worked for me. Especially with exwives in pictures.LOL

An example of what you are trying to do would be useful to work out the best approach. Meanwhile, have you looked at Liquid Resacale, which is a GIMP plug in?

Norman