What a loop is for
A bottle cap on a tablecloth, a sticker on a wall, a bird on a telephone wire, a crisp packet on a lawn, a price sticker on a product. Each is small, has an edge you can draw round, and sits on ground that carries on beyond it. That last part is what the fill needs: something to copy from.
- Open the photo. Patch is already armed (key 7).
- Press and drag a loop round the object, a little outside its edge. Let go to close it.
- Watch the meter. Past 4 % of the frame, or six disc-widths across, the loop is refused before anything is read.
- Drag the seam across the patch. If it smeared, remove it from the Placed list and leave that object alone.
Not a person, a car or a building. Not text on a sign, and not a pattern with a hard grid — brickwork, tiles, a fence — which a fill reproduces as a blur. The seam shows that before you save.
For a single speck, a tap is quicker: Remove spots from a photo. For a line — a hair, a wire, a scratch — drag a Heal stroke: Remove a mark from a photo. Published numbers for the refusal are on How the refusal is measured.
Questions about small objects
- How big is too big?
- Two limits, both written into the code. The loop may cover at most 4 % of the frame, and it may run at most six disc-widths across — the disc being the long edge of your file divided by fifty-six, held between 14 and 56 pixels. The meter on the stage shows the share as you draw: “2.8 % of 4 %”.
- What happens above it?
- Nothing is changed and the tool says why: it fills small areas from what surrounds them and cannot remove a person, a car or a building. There is no link to a bigger tool and no upsell — the limit is the product.
- Is anything invented?
- No. Every value written inside the loop is copied from the picture a little way outside it, by the same patch search a spot uses. If the object carries on past your line — a cable that runs out of the loop, a shadow attached to it — the ring test sees it and refuses: draw round all of it.
- Can I draw the loop without a mouse?
- Yes. Focus the picture, walk the crosshair with the arrow keys, press Enter at each corner (up to twelve), and press Enter a second time without moving to close the loop.
