0. Pre-lim. Why are you reading this? (because your not lazy and want to run Gimp and Resynthesize pics on your own; I hope)

This is short tutorial on how to remove crazy-complicated artifacts, trash pieces, etc from photos and all for free! This technique was demoed as for inclusion in CS5 as a content-aware plugin that removed trees from the background, a piece of trash on the golf course, and removed a tree out of the sky. Another picture shows a complete removal of a road going through a desert. What content aware plug-ins do is completely re-synthesize the area that is selected for removal by using algorithms that hunt for near-by similar pixels. This, also maybe used to fill in the gaps in panoramas of mountains, landscapes, where the edges of the photos don't line up.

So now you know what this whole tutorial is about, and after you get through this, removing objects or re-creating areas of photos will be simple. No more getting mad at the STAMPY TOOL! Now, I should state that even though I'm lucky enough to be able to use an 8-core Mac Pro, this installation doesn't really seem to use more then one-core. I hope this is fixed in the future, but this seems to pertain to most computers right now...so it's not as quick as say CS5 will be running in a fully-utilized Mac OS X environment.

Let’s get this thing started.

0.5. Make sure you have X11 environment installed from Apple. Be sure after downloading X11, to run updates like mad. (Apple Menu > Software Updates)

[DOWNLOAD] > X11

1. Install Gimp. As of this writing I have version 2.6.8

[DOWNLOAD] > The Gimp > Which OS do you have? Mac OS X 10.6, 10.5, 10.4 direct downloads]

2. The Gimp should show up in Hard Drive > Applications open it to see if you have everything installed right, if it doesn’t work, run Software Update again until there isn’t anything X11-related to update.

3. Open the picture you want to edit into Gimp either by dragging it onto the Gimp icon in the dock or by going to File > Open. I’ve chosen this picture I took of an apocalyptic like situation, completely unedited.

reddit.com/r/atheism: even in times of end-of-times discontent, fun times can be had.

4. Next choose the lasso selection tool and select the object you want to get rid of.

Here I’ve chosen to get rid of a stick that divides my whole composition in half: “Grr” one might say in the pre-Gimp past, but keep in mind, this is the post gimp-a-limptic future.

5. Now Choose Filters > Map > Resynthesize from the menus that appear in the same window as your picture.

Rendering and X11 with multiple Cores.

6. Just push OK on the window that comes up, but if you want to compare settings, or whatever else, here is my setup.



Notice the Rendering Bar right below your image:

Notice how many cores are used in my octo-core Mac:



The Intel Core Duos (with 2 cores) would probably have only 1 core in use at one time as well. Hopefully this will be fixed either by future Gimp versions or by Apple’s X11 environment. When working on the full size image which is about 5k x 3k pixels, the mac 8-core struggled a little more, taking about a minute to render on a single core. Granted, for making things quick, you can resize to a quarter the size. That brings time down to about 10 seconds and better for playing around with this plug-in.

7. Now that you’ve done all the dirty work, you should have a very clean picture. Lasso, Resynth, Repeat as needed. See !! No more stick! “WHOchA GOOD boy!”



Thanks for reading.