Object remover in full resolution

Painting happens on a working copy no longer than 1,600 pixels, because a brush has to keep up with a hand. Everywhere on this site a removal is then computed on the full-size picture and shown reduced — but on the other routes a region too large for the device's budget falls back to the working copy and is re-rendered at full size when you save, and its row says so. In HD mode that fallback is not taken: the large region is cut into overlapping tiles and every tile is filled at native size.

Each tile reads the tiles already finished as known picture, and where two tiles overlap the later one is blended in with a raised cosine across 64 pixels, so no tile edge shows. It costs time — a large region is several fills, not one — and memory: the full-size copy of a 24-megapixel photograph is about 92 MB, which is why the mode says what it is holding as soon as the picture opens, and why a picture beyond the device's budget is told so rather than silently reduced.

1. 1Open the full-size original. Not a screenshot of it and not a messaging-app copy. The cost line states the megapixels and memory held.
2. 2Paint at the stage size. You paint on the reduced stage; the region is lifted to full size precisely when you erase.
3. 3Erase. Small regions are one full-size pass. Large ones show Tile N of M as they go.
4. 4Check at 1:1. Press = for actual size and pan over the join. What you see is what is saved.
5. 5Save. The file is written from the full-size copy as it stands — nothing is computed a second time.

• There is still a ceiling: the full-size copy must fit this device's memory budget (24 megapixels on most desktops, half that on devices that report 4 GB or less). Past it, the page says so and the usual re-render on save applies.
• Tiled patch search takes several times longer than a single pass on a large region.
• Higher resolution does not make a fill more truthful; it makes the same invention sharper.
• The clone fill is not tiled — it copies from a pin and is computed at full size whenever it fits.