The Space Cowboy wrote:
Can you describe more?

ehh. kind of? I was trying to remove a large painting from behind a head. The wall was unevenly lit, in both intensity and (slightly) in color. The content-aware deletion was a joke, as always, and the patch tool gave me this:



Note the dark patch in the middle (retained from the original area?) and the strange lightening around the borders. Also, the slightly visible pattern of texture-tessellation in the middle.

I eventually solved this problem by cloning and patching repeatedly, and I still ended up with banding that I had to noise-up a tad.

Since I do lots of frequency separation, and since it's much easier to find a good texture source than a good texture AND color source, it would speed things up considerably if I could just select an area of out-of-focus, and fill it with blended gradients from the edges. I guess like this mock-up...

The Space Cowboy wrote:
Can you get your wall texture from a high pass and build your own grad for the low frequencies and combine?

ideally that's what I'll do every time. I've also wanted this kind of thing for removing power lines against sky, larger blemishes against skin of graduated tonality, etc. anything that wants to be removed could benefit.

I don't know if i've seen step 6 in that tutorial before, but I'll look into it.

I might also be able to use content-aware fill in some crazy capacity; i have some ideas burping around in the braincase. Thanks for the help!

Ken Fournelle wrote:
I simply select the wall elements and fill with the wall color.  Add a Clipped grey layer that has slightly blurred noise.  You can create  light fall-off with graduated shadows in Overlay or Softlight.

the wall color here varies quite a bit. simply filling doesn't work at all. additionally, I'll want to use this elsewhere, where the colors vary by much more than they do here. I also have little luck with trying to carve in giant, subtle shadows with a tone layer.

Ken Fournelle wrote:
I'll bet the color on the wall varies because  you have color contamination coming from other light sources or bounce from colored objects.  The wall does not have those color casts.

ohmygod.

yes, there is color contamination, as was stated previously.

i also don't want this method just to erase one picture on a wall (as was also stated previously); i do a LOT of split-frequency retouching and it would be helpful to be able to erase objects from the blur layer and have some way of seamlessly blending the surrounding colors in a nice gradient, at least as a starting point for further painting.

Mask Photo wrote:
additionally, I'll want to use this elsewhere, where the colors vary by much more than they do here.

really, if you're not even going to read the posts so you can be constructive, why do you bother replying?