Repair tool can't be made to work at the image edges (particularly with sky)

This isn’t a new problem with PhotoLab 6, but it remains a very serious one and might be getting even worse over time. With image after image, I’ve been completely unable to use the repair tool on a patch of sky at the edge of an image, whether cropped or not. No matter how bright the source patch is, the destination patch gets darker and darker the more I try to repair it. Take this patch of sky as an example:

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The image has had a large amount of perspective correction applied, so I undid the keystone crop in this corner I want to work in. If I try an initial repair over the tree branch with a single patch, I get this mess:

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Trying smaller repairs results in a lighter fix, but the fixed area becomes very mottled and any attempt to paint over a large piece of that restores the dark smudges.

The best solution I’ve found (only a workaround) is with the ReShape tool, which requires a ViewPoint 4 license:

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Inelegant, but sufficient. The repair tool really needs to be… um… REPAIRED! Please make it better, DxO. Thank you.

Incidentally, there are quite a few votable feature requests open to improve the repair tool. Some of those requests have been achieved with PL6. Yet this edge problem seems in my experience to be getting worse. I used to only find it difficult to finesse the repair tool into giving me a clean fix at the edge of sky. Now I can’t do that at all without resorting to other tools.

More complex repairs are actually easier!! In another corner of the same image, where there is a variety of plant growth, I was able to use the repair tool with no difficulty whatsoever. It did a beautiful job. I started with just the corner of the keystone crop:

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Great! I likewise have no difficulty at all if I repair the cropped-out corner all the way to the boundaries:

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A stunning result, in my opinion! Yes, this is also darkened by the repair process. But in this case it works fine. It can’t work in sky.

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What I do is use the Clone tool to first fill in the blank space then I switch to the Repair tool to tidy it up. Works pretty well.

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Greg I agree that the repair tool needs very badly to be fixed and has gotten worse in PL6. I simply use the reshape tool as my default go-to to fix black corners. I don’t find it to be inelegant at all and furthermore it does not require an export to be used. Also as @KeithRJ mentioned, the clone tool works very nicely and seems to be improved in PL6. Clone has become my favorite of the two options: Repair or Clone whereas Repair was always my favorite before PL6.

Thanks, Keith! I tried cloning over the branches in the corner of the sky: the resulting patch was lighter than its surroundings. So I deselected the ReTouch mode, then re-enabled it and selected Repair and painted over the same patch. It worked!

That’s a big relief to me. Now I have two viable workarounds until this is fixed.

I agree, Mark, that ReShape is great for fixing black edges/corners. I’m using it a lot for that and am loving it each time. :smile: But for removing unwanted objects, it isn’t always good.

I have been noticing the same. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t and it leaves a dark halo in the sky. Often, resetting the clone actions and restarting from scratch does the trick.

The Repair tool by default ‘blends’ new content over the existing one, to get a preferably invisible result, that is, the existing content (the black corners in this case) will mostly shine through, smearing the edges …

Like @KeithRJ mentioned, first fill those parts with the Clone tool copying the new colour / content onto it, before using the Repair tool to ‘egalize’ … while with gradients it can get tedious.

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you can vote here:

Fine, but please understand that the present complaint has nothing to do with extending the canvas. The aim is to perform simple repairs at the image edges without extra steps.

If that’s what’s actually happening (I’m not so sure), DxO should fix it. The black edges aren’t part of the image! They only come in through perspective correction and don’t even technically have to be black. :wink:

Greg, you are right.
You were not talking about black edges caused by perspective correction, which indeed would be ‘outside’ of the pic.
– It is, when you export with black edges say as TIFF and want to restore them, now belonging to the pic, you have that problem.

As you demonstrated, for some reason the same thing happens with the Repair tool close to the border.
→ And the ‘solution’ is to use the Clone tool first … (a similar thing in old PS).

I confirm this unacceptable behavior. How I do solve it: by using the “nearly” same tool as offered by a competitor. (ACDSee Ultimate 2023, but previous or less expensive version of ACDSee worked also) To avoid making several conversions between the 2 software, I do the needed corrections only at the end of my workflow within DXO and directly on the exported file using ACDSee. Note that my library is on ACDSee, as I am their customer since around 20 years and as moving a complete library of more than 70k pictures is a lot of work. But I prefer DXO for editing.

This edge repair problem might be easily fixed if the tool would only work within the cropped area, both for source and target. It is really frustrating when the entire source is beyond the edge.

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