With the recent Pixelmator 3.2 update they updated the repair tool which was a new addition in Pixelmator 3.0. Today I want to go into some details on what the repair tool update can do. First the repair tool is the bandaid type icon on the tools menu. When you click on it and then go into the settings (the gear icon on the top left) you can see 3 different editing types:

  • Quick
  • Standard
  • Advanced

    • pixelmator heal

    The Quick editing type is best for very small fixes to your image. If you have some dust spots or small imperfections then select the Quick option and paint over the imperfection to remove.

    The Standard editing type is best for very straight forward repairs. If you have something you want to remove from a photo that’s against a simple background (like power lines in the sky, or in this example a light pole) all you have to do is select the Standard option and then paint over the object to remove. Here I picked a pretty large brush and loosely covered the pole on the right of the image.

    pixelmator repair brush

    A couple seconds later and Pixelmator runs it’s magic and the pole is perfectly removed.

    pixelmator repair brush after

    The Advanced option is for editing out larger items from an image. In my testing so far the algorithm seems to be very similar to the Standard editing option but it does seem to blend things into the background a little better. In this example I edited out the boats from the waterway. I first tried the Standard repair tool option and there were some hard lines around the area where the boats were. With the Advanced option the background was blurred a little bit better.

    Here you can see the before:

    pixelmator repair brush before2

    and the after shot:

    pixelmator repair brush after2

    In this example I just very quickly brushed out the boats with a wide brush. It took me about 15 seconds and was really quick and easy. I could have spent a little more time with a smaller brush to get a slightly better effect but wanted to show how the application can perform with a very large and somewhat sloppy brush.

    Overall it’s very similar to the healing brush in Photoshop and renders very quickly.

    If you don’t have Pixelmator it’s a Mac only app (sorry PC folks) and you can get it in the Mac App Store here:

    If you want to learn how to use Pixelmator check out my book on Amazon “Learning Pixelmator“.