Selection Obscure/Removing/Hiding

[sradforth]

Just updated the 'Selection Obscurer' plugin to now support the lasso selections which gives it flexibility to remove any shaped items from a photo. Also moved the plugin to the 'Selection' menu to match the other plugins.

SelectionObscureV13.zip

[nitenurse79]

This looks interesting, but the first example is a little bit rough. Could this not be done with some creative use of the clone tool? Not knocking your plug-in, just asking

[Rick Brewster]

I'm pretty sure this is more akin to content-aware resizing, and not something the clone stamp can do on its own.

[sradforth]

Yes, you're both right.

The main distinction is that the stamp tool copies all the pixels so whilst the interior of the stamp is solid, the edges normally leave a visible join which needs to be blended in. Sometime's it's not even feasible to use the stamp tool, skin is a perfect material that causes me time to get looking right via the stamp tool fo instance as the gradient on the skin is rarely constant.

The content-aware resizing is new to me and just watched that siggraph 07 presentation and totally blown away by it! Wow, simply amazing and will take a closer look at that... thanks for introducing me to it. Do you know if anyone has brought it to Paint.NET yet (or plans to)? It's different technique (I wish mine was a advanced as that) but this selection obscuring only effects the pixels in your selected area without readjusting the entire image.

The first example is more to show how it's working and yes in large selections it will leave a blurry area on the selection that's been erased, the plugin comes into its own on smaller quick touch ups like in the second set of examples.

For instance removing a corporate logo from an image (I have to do this with my company marketting images regularly) it will quickly remove them leaving a pattern the eye normally will skim over and not notice. License plates and the likes work well too now that you can select non-rectangular regions.

I'd expect anyone who is doing portrait photos and wants to remove dust from the lens or spots/freckles/moles/left over food/extra limbs/etc.. may like to try this. Just draw around the mole (being sure the edges do not touch any of the pixels of the mole iteself) and press the selection obscurer plugin and it vanishes... not saying moles should be removed from photos before I offend anyone.

[Rei]

This is amazing. Did you come up with the algorithm yourself?