Gimp Resynthesizer Explained - Texture Transfer and Input and Output

Note: 
As was mentioned in a comment on this post, Resynthesizer no longer does what this blog suggests; if you want the functions shown in this blog, please use Filters > Enhance > Heal selection Click here for the tutorial.

In a previous post I talked a bit about the Gimp plugin Resynthesizer. Someone posted a comment asking for a bit more explanation; more specifically, what the elements of the plugin mean. This actually is not easy to find out. The Resynthesizer website shows what the program can do, but does not really say how. It took me a while to figure it out, but I finally did and will be showing all of the ins and outs of the Resynthesizer plugin.

This is going to be a bit less of a tutorial and more of a guide for Resynthesizer. If you want to see something specific, let me know and I can do a tutorial on it.

First thing you should do is download and install the Resynthesizer plugin from its website. If you are not sure how to do that, visit this tutorial.

Here is a picture of me jumping in Valdez, Alaska. I want to remove me from the picture. Resynthesizer seems to work flawlessly when the background is sky.

Select the part you want removed.

Open the plugin (Filters>Map>Resynthesize...)

Leave the settings as they are and press OK.

Magic!

Now I will explain a bit more about the other features of Resynthesizer.

You will notice that there are checkboxes for "Make horizontally tileable" and "Make Vertically tileable." These options determines where Resynthesizer looks to get the pixels it will use to fill in the selection. For the above image, I have the bridge selected because I have it gone. Because it is the bottom of the screen, and because I want to keep my horizon looking consistent, I am going to Uncheck "Make Vertically tileable." Now it is not going to look above and beneath, just to the right or the left.

Perfect!

There is another checkbox for "Fit output to bordering pixes." With this checked, pixes are matched at the edge of the selection. This makes for a smooth transition so that it is difficult to tell what you had selected.

To better illustrate this, I am going to select everything but the sky, and un-check the "Fit output to bordering pixes" option.

You can see that there is a definite distinction of where the selection was. Resynthesizer basically copied the top and moved it to the bottom.

This is good though. Now if we select the weird transition area and check the option to fit output to bordering pixels, it will fix our sky.

Now when we run it. we have a pretty good looking sky retaining the gradient.

Texture Transfer

Texture transfer was something a bit more difficult to figure out. Still seems buggy at times but I think I can help explain it a bit now.

For this, I am going to crop the picture so only my head shows.
Create a new (larger) image to transfer the texture to.

For the Input we want to make sure that the Texture source is selecting the texture (in this case, my head). Check the "Use texture transfer" check box. Move the "Map Importance" slider all the way to the left.

Map importance determines how much of the original picture will be used. The lowest it is (furthest to left) means it will use as much of the image as possible. The higher the number (to the right) means it will focus more on getting similar colors and texture.

This texture was run with the slider to the left. Kind of creepy and not useful (I have an example below that IS useful)

Now if we move the slider to the right a bit more...

We get a cool looking texture that we could use as a graphic background.

This is something you should play around and experiment with.

Here is a picture of a field of flowers that I used to create a texture:

Woot! Impressive.

NOTES: 

• The input map and output map are pretty important. Make sure these are correct or it will not work.
• When doing a texture transfer, make sure you select Filters>Map>Resynthesizer on the OUTPUT. That is, make sure you are exiting the new (blank) image, and not the original image with the texture you are trying to recreate. It will not work unless you do this correct.
• If one of your images has an alpha channel and the other does not, it will not work. Make sure the images are the same (example: grayscale=grayscale, rgb=rgb, alpha=alpha, etc...)
• There is another tab for "Tweaks." I won't bother explaining this because it is explained pretty well in the plugin. In most instances you will not need to use any tweaks.