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