I have never been able to master the repair and clone tool. Hence, I have never been able to remove registration number from my images, or annoying features.
I have been having another play, but still no joy. It seems to randomly pick another area to clone from, in this case it was another letter from the registration number, see screenshot image 1. or if I try to obliterate the whole number, it randomly picks a different part of the vehicle, see screenshot images 2 and 3.
Can anyone advise what I am doing wrong or a stage/setting that I am missing.
Please give it in an idiots language.
Do you know that you can move the selected area where you want? Just point your mouse at the marker for the selected area and move it.
If you look at controls next to the Brush, you got +Brush to add more to the area where you want to clone. The eraser of course erases from the area. And the box lets you change the shape and more. Just experiment with the different options!
As @TorsteinH mentioned, you can move the “clone source” point to a preferred location. Try dragging this point around to practice to see how it works.
Start with a small brush and get little nibbles when starting with a small clone source. Don’t try to get it all with one go. As your white space grows you can increase brush size and amount selected. You can see the density of points near the starting “F”. Adjust the feathering to get a better blend-in if desired. Just 2-3 minutes maximum.
This is from your first jpg image so some noise shows, but you can blur and desaturate to clean up as @andras.csore suggested.
As others have said, choosing the source of the clone is the most control you can (and should) exert.
In the case of a license plate, @swmurray has taken the approach I would use — using the white areas of the plate as a source to cover the black.
Another trick is literally to scramble the plate by replacing one character with another. In the example case it would be relatively effective, though much more difficult if it was oblique in the frame.
The key thing to note is the tool is not a ‘magic eraser’. It’s literally a copy-and-paste tool. The difference between clone and repair being how much of the original remains (none or some respectively).
I use it for my number-plate removal and while it’s not perfect, I find you can go in a lot closer to the image than in PhotoLab and you can quickly (usually) get images with a clean plate that’s good enough for most uses.
It’s also a pixel editor, so if you’d rather just paint in parts of the plate to match its background colour then blur the results, you can do that too.
Thanks very much for all your replies, tips and tricks, you have all been very helpful. TorsteinH - Yes, I did find that, but if you want to mask the whole number plate in one go, you need to find a matching colour of the same size area. I have found by making the size small, and thus the selected area very small, then repeat, until you have a larger area to match it to. I am getting better results, but this is time consuming and the colour can be noticeably inconsistent. As zkarj says I need to be more particular in choosing the cloning source. I am sure I will better at it with practice. I may try Affinity as others have suggested to pixel paint it out.
I am wondering how much of a need there is to hide the VRM on the vehicles we capture in our images. After all we don’t mask the faces of people we happen to capture.
All those solutions seem very fiddly. In Windows Paint just tend to paint over the area in a sympathetic colour. No blurring, no fading - just gone. Not on a RAW file of course.
Select numberplate with brush and blur!