Liquid Rescale plugin step-by-step

Liquid Rescale plugin not working...

Anonymous (70.65.192.x) 22 Aug 2008 00:59

Not trying to be a pain in the ass, but can someone provide precise steps on how to discard objects in an image? Seriously, I've followed the last thread, saw the video, read the manual. NOTHING. IS. WORKING. What am I missing? It would be cool if someone can provide steps and I'll point out where it starts to fail.

Thanks in advance.

Re: Liquid Rescale plugin not working...

CarloB 03 Sep 2008 02:09

Try following exactly these steps:

• open gimp
• open an image, better if it has a single layer (a jpg image, for example)
• in the menu, choose Layer and then Liquid Rescale
• click on the New button in the Discard features section on the right: a new layer will be created
• put the plugin window on one side of the screen without closing it, and go back to work on the gimp main windows
• choose the paint tool and paint over the area you wish to remove
• go back to the plugin window
• click the Refresh button at the bottom: you should see your discard mask appear in the preview
• click the Auto size button at the bottom of the Discard features section
• click OK

Re: Liquid Rescale plugin not working...

Anonymous (70.65.192.x) 03 Sep 2008 20:20

Thanks! Though the result is far from the promise of this technology. :/

Re: Liquid Rescale plugin not working...

CarloB 03 Sep 2008 20:36

The one described is only the very basic way of using the plugin (and changing the "Auto size" direction will already give quite different results, normally).
Play around with the options in order to get better results (in particular, you will almost always need to use some preservation masks).

Re: Liquid Rescale plugin not working...

Anonymous (70.65.192.x) 04 Sep 2008 10:52

Well, the key thing I overlooked was that the image has to be resized in order to discard the object, which is undesirable. Obviously, if I resize to the original size later, the picture will look even more degraded. My picture I'm editting is a photograph of this model with a logo at the bottom right, and if I paint over the logo and resize, her hips will look outta proportion, and resizing back to normal width made her look like some down-syndrome hoe. I have another idea, maybe I should paint over the logo with the discard mask and paint everything else with the protection mask.

Re: Liquid Rescale plugin not working...

CarloB 04 Sep 2008 11:43

No, you shouldn't. Go through the tutorial and understand how the plugin works, please.
Also, you should consider that in some cases other methods give better results.

Last edited on 04 Sep 2008 11:44 by CarloB Show more

Re: Liquid Rescale plugin not working...

Anonymous (70.65.192.x) 04 Sep 2008 17:46

I have, and I understand how it works. It carves out (or in) parts of the image more intelligently than linear, dumb resize techniques. And I understand that simply removing the logo by hand would be wiser, I was just testing out the feasibility of this seam-carving technique. I think the technique is way in its infancy and does no better than Lanczos resize. If the entire photo has to be affected for the removal of one object than that's not really useful. There was this automated method for removing elements in a picture/video by analyzing the surrounding pixels and doing a non-linear prediction scheme but I can't recall the name at the moment. It wasn't perfect, 'cuz you had to generate noise into the video to hide the artifacts.

Re: Liquid Rescale plugin not working...

CarloB 04 Sep 2008 21:43

Well, it's called Liquid Rescale, you shouldn't be much surprised if it changes the whole picture.
With some pictures it works great, with others it needs a lot of tweaking and some expertise, with others it just works bad. No surprise here either, it's inherent in the precedure.
Anyway if it's not useful to you, then just don't use it. It's that simple.

Last edited on 04 Sep 2008 21:45 by CarloB Show more

Re: Liquid Rescale plugin step-by-step

Cheryl (guest) 23 Apr 2009 16:13

I am following the directions and the tutorial for the Liquid Rescale plugin but the step "*click on the New button in the Discard features section on the right: a new layer will be created" is not available to click. In fact the whole page "Feature Masks" does not allow me to make any checks. What is wrong?

Re: Liquid Rescale plugin step-by-step

CarloB 23 Apr 2009 16:28

What version of the plugin are you using? In the last one (0.6), the label "New" in that button was substitued with a small icon (the step-by step tutrial is slightly outdated).
That button is never inactive (grayed out), even when all the other elements in the mask page are.

Another thing which is different between the last version and the tutorial ("Quick element removal" section) is the location of the "Mode" box, which was moved from under the size controls to the "output" page (and slightly modified, too).