Fix blank areas after using Transform tool
Really surprised I don’t seem to be able to use the fix or eraser tools to fill in the ‘blank’ areas that can appear after using the transform tool - for example I transformed a image of a statue against a plain blue sky, but am now left with white triangles that i’ll need to crop out and lose other parts of the photo because I can’t clone the sky into those areas.
I guess I might be able to do it if I go into layers, but it should be an easy task in Develop or Effects
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I just use the scale tool within transform. That fills the area by expanding the image. If that didn't work in a particular image, I'd crop.
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Both those methods potentially lose parts of the image I'd rather keep. The Perfect Eraser does nothing at all, while the Clone Stamp looks as if it is painting in the area as you move the brush, but it clears when you release it. Currently I export the image out of ON1 to do what I want, but would prefer to do it where I am in ON1. For example, if I scale or crop this image, I'd lose part of the statue on the left - cloning the sky in to the blank areas is what I want to do.
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If you want to clone the sky, use the clone stamp in either develop or effects. It should be cake doing that with this photo. If you had a more complex sky, you could open both the transformed photo and the original in layers so that you can use the original to fill in the holes. No need for that with this photo though.
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That's what I'm saying doesn't work, Rick. As you say, it should be a piece of cake, but it's as if it doesn't want to paint over the transparent pixels revealed by the transform using either tool. Try it with one of your own images and see if it does (or doesn't) do the same for you.
I'm on Win10 standalone btw...0 -
From all the described symptoms, sounds like transform changes the canvas size to there's no canvas on which you can clone anything. I just played around and found something that seems to work. I transformed a photo with keystone to get the same gaps at the top and top sides. As you noted, cloning didn't work in the gap areas. I then took the photo to resize. The dimensions were 11.52" x 15.36" at 300 pix/in. I changed the dimensions to 12" x 16" at same resolution. I saw no difference in content (i.e., no apparent cropping). Went back to develop and was able to clone in the gaps. So all I did was establish a larger canvas that included the gaps so I could then clone into them. Should work for you.
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Another option, since the sky is the white part this makes it really easy. Make a version of the photo without transform applied. Take the both versions to layers. With the photo with the white spaces as the top layer simply mask out the white areas . This screen shot has a gap in the mask so you can see it works. This obviously would only work with sky since buildings etc as in my picture are offset but I think would work well.
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Thanks everyone. As I postulated in my original post, taking it into layers was an option. And thanks Stephen for trying resize - I did too but didn't make any changes to the canvas size and it worked. I also did the same with exporting and edited the output. In both cases, I think rendering the image changes those areas (maybe transparent pixels) into white which I can then paint over.
Can't really think of any reason why I shouldn't have been able to clone them in situ in transform or crop though. I did submit this as a bug, but haven't heard anything back at all. Maybe it's currently operating as designed (?), so I should maybe have submitted it as a feature request.
Thanks again0 -
I just tried it too and you're right. Even though the clone tool LOOKS like it's painting there, it doesn't stick. I always assumed there was still canvas in that area. I was going to say that On1 should fix the canvas after adjusting, but if it did that it would mean the extra photo that's off the edges would get clipped and you wouldn't be able to re-adjust it later. I think the way it works is fine as long as you're aware and know you need layers if you want to fill it in.
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I've had the same problem of cloning something into the "white area" left behind after leveling an image. Could not do this conveniently in PR so I transferred the image into PS, made use of the clone and/or content aware tools in the usual way, and then transferred the result back into PR.
Probably a bug or oversight in PR. Should report this to PR Support.
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Has anyone heard if ON1 are going to fix this issue/enhancement request?
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Nope, haven't heard anything outside of this thread. I consider this problem the same as the missing canvas resize and colour fill. They are annoying but there are work arounds. In fact if we didn't have the missing canvas resize problem, we wouldn't have this problem either.
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Just an update on the blank Transform areas. I've discovered that if you duplicate your layer and immediately merge the two back together, the canvas will reset and you'll be able to clone into those blank areas.
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I have experimented with this problem for a while now and I can't make it work. If I clone stamp a part of the area I want to cover, then it works, but when I want to proceed and clone stamp the rest, my first part disapears. Don't they want to recognice this as a bug?
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Was too fast.... I have found a work around. If I create a version of my photo, then I can clone stamp in that version. Seams to work.... But I would regard this as a bug, anyway.
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This is just my opinion but I think what is going on is that the canvas itself is being rotated rather than rotating the image on the canvas. There is no canvas where white areas appear hence you cannot do anything with them on that layer. With the new ability in 2019.5 to change your canvas size (still need to use layers for this I believe) you should be able to rotate the image then resize the canvas allowing the blank areas to be filled in however is needed.
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I had an issue where there was not enough 'space' to the side of the subject in my photo so I thought I would simply increase the canvass size and then clone. As noted above, it seemed to work but when releasing the mouse button, there was nothing there.
This is clearly a bug and needs fixing properly than having to use workarounds.
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Philip, have you submitted a bug report to support? There is a link at the bottom of the page to contact support.
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Just tried another approach. I created a brand new canvas, bigger than original photo, and added original photo as layer. Tried to clone but still did not work! This works okay in ACDSee but have just moved from ACDSee to ON1 so don't want to have to use multiple programs.
I did try duplicating the original photo on the enlarged canvas, but that did not work either.
Given this was spotted 11mths ago it should have been fixed. Please sort as a free bug fix but if anyone has any ideas how to workaround this particular issue in the meantime it would be appreciated.
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It won't get fixed if it doesn't get reported. The support folks at ON1 do not respond here.
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Philip, try this I have done it in the past.
Open photo and transform to your liking ( now you have blank areas.)
Add a layer ( pick any image ) and and size it to what you think might be right.
Mask out the image on the new layer so you have a blank canvas
Merge the layers
You should now be able clone.
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As I said above, when I first encountered this, I bug reported it but heard nothing back. It might have even been discussed on the FB page as a ‘how to’ and iirc was said to be working as designed. I too thought the canvas size option would have resolved it but no.
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Not being able to clone onto a blank canvas area is not a bug. The canvas is simply a workspace. You need to have a layer covering the canvas blank area in order to clone to it which is why Davids suggestion works.
Look at it this way, if you start in Browse and create a new canvas, you won't be able to do ANYTHING with it until you add at least one layer. It's not the canvas that you're cloning to, it's the Layer.
In the past, when I've had this problem, I simply duplicated the layer and merged it back with itself. This creates a rectangular layer without the voids in the corners. I would suggest doing this BEFORE adding any other adjustments or your work will get permanently baked in.
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Thank you to both David and Rick for their comments.
I am not sure what I am trying to do fits in quite with the suggestions made. I actually want to add space to the side of my photo so I can add background.
I did try taking a file, then resizing to a larger pixel width and saving as a low quality jpg. I then opened this and masked it completely out (black mask). Next, I opened a second (new) layer with the actual file I wanted to enlarge and positioned relative to the first layer (as an aside, is there any way to aid positioning relative to other layers, e.g. snap to edges etc?).
So far so good. So I merged layers which left me an empty area into which to clone. However, when I did clone, it did not work and I just got left with a cloned area which bore no resemblance to the original area being cloned from.
Not to be outdone, I got On1 to save this as a psd file (a huge 134MB file compared to the 75MB of the original which took about two minutes!) and re-opened and tried to clone again. This time the side of the photo was actually white (not transparent) and cloning, whilst it did clone, was heavily faded.
So, still stuck I am afraid.
By the way, I logged a support call and received a response as follows "Unfortunately there is no way to achieve this in ON1 PHOTO RAW 2019, this is a limitation of our software specifically with increased canvass size or cropping. We appreciated the feedback and I will forward this suggestion." This means that if/when fixed I would have to pay for another upgrade (and I have already done this recently going from 2018-2019 so less than impressed.
Hence, more detailed suggestions would be appreciated otherwise I will have to revert to ACDSee for this file. Whilst ACDSee is a good program with some excellent features (and generally quicker in execution than On1) its lacks the superb AI masking of ON1 and lacks the consistency in approach between develop, local and layering in On1.
Thanks.
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Hey Philip, from your description, it seems to me that it 'should' work. Not sure where the problem is, so I have an exercise for you to try:
- Pick any unedited photo and open it in Edit
- Select FILE / Canvas size
- Change the Canvas to 2x the photo size (if it was 4000 pixels on the long edge, set it to 8000) and Apply
- Duplicate the Layer
- Select the lower layer and use Transform to fill the canvas
- Change the same layer to a White Color Fill Layer:
- --- select Local adjust
- --- invert the mask
- --- select paint with colour and change it to white
- Merge the 2 layers together
You should now have a large white border around your photo and your cloning should work anywhere in that area. Once you see that it works, you should be able to adapt it to your needs.
Note that you should do this with an unedited photo because the merge will bake in any of the edits you've already made.
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If you Create Stamped Layer (Command/Control-Shift-J) rather than Merge, a new layer will be created for the merge leaving the original layers below untouched. I turn off the lower layers so they don't get put into the render queue needlessly. Don't know if it makes any difference in performance but it makes me think it should. :) It makes the file sizes huge though. I trash the lower layers once I've decided I don't need to go back and adjust a mask, or make other changes to one of the layers and I can redo the merge.
Don't know if it makes any difference in performance but it makes me think it should. :)
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Rick,
Thanks for this. It all went okay until I got to Merge. Now please bear in mind I am not that familiar with working with layers, so when you said Merge, I tried selecting the top layer (being the copy) and merge layer, but nothing appeared to happen and I still had two layers. Cloning did not work. So I started again from the beginning and this time did merge visible, but again, nothing happened and still had two layers.
This does not seem right to me. Should I not end up with one layer, whether I merge layer or merge visible? For info, I am running 2019.5
Thanks.
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Just before merging it should look like this. When done you'll have only 1 layer.
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Rick
I had done exactly as you had shown. Anyway, suspecting it was another ON 1 funny, I shut down ON 1 and restarted. I went through the above again as you described and thankfully, this time, it worked.
I do get this with ON 1 from time to time, where things sometimes don't work properly. I had done quite a bit of editing (without using layers) on several other photos beforehand, but it really shouldn't do things like this. That said, ON1 is not alone. I have had issues with ACDSee and DXO Photolab 2 where they can do funny things, only to be okay once restarted.
So a big thank you for your help with the workaround, it is much appreciated.
Phil.
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Glad you got it figured out. The key is that you can't clone to the canvas, the layer that you're cloning has to cover the entire area to be cloned.
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In the version of On1 PR-2021.5 The problem continues.
I propose a 'solution' that in my opinion is more comfortable than those previously proposed.
1º Load the unmodified photo in the Edit module and apply the desired Camera Profile
2º Add a layer of white color and turn it off
3º Transform the layer that contains the photo
4th Merge the two layers
Now it can be cloned without problem.0
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