Spot clean, Find distractions and the AI lasso
Three tools on the top panel take something out of a photograph, and all three fill the gap each time the photograph is drawn: the original is never painted on. Spot clean is the sixth tool on the panel; Find distractions and AI lasso are two of the four violet tools at its right. None of them needs an AI provider or a network; the fill runs on your Mac.
Spot clean
- Press Spot clean. The bar under the frame reads Drag over something to clean it out, followed by what the armed fill mode does.
- Drag a rectangle over the thing you want gone. It is filled at once, and the bar counts the regions: 1 region cleaned · filled at render. Clean before you crop or correct the frame; the caution below says why.
- Draw as many as you need. Clear on the bar removes them all; each region is also its own line in the Changes tab, with an × to remove just that one.
Each region is one step of ⌘Z. Keep Heal regions small; the caution at the end of the next section says why.
On a frame that carries a crop, a straighten, a perspective correction or a lens correction, the fill does not land where you drew it. The canvas shows the frame cropped and corrected, and the dashed marker sits where you dragged. But the region is kept against the whole, uncorrected photograph and filled there, before the lens correction, perspective, straighten and crop are applied, so the fill often lands outside the crop. The regions Find distractions proposes and the AI lasso's loops go wrong the same way.
Clean first, then crop, straighten and correct: a region you have already drawn stays put when you add a crop later. On a frame that already carries one of those, take it off in the Changes tab, clean, and make it again.
Heal or Clone, Rectangle or Ellipse
Under its sentence the bar carries four chips in two pairs, Heal and Clone, then Rectangle and Ellipse. Both pairs are preferences for the next region you draw; choosing one does not change a region already placed.
- Heal blends the surrounding tone and colour into the region. It is what every region does unless you say otherwise, and what Find distractions proposes.
- Clone copies pixels from a source you choose. A region drawn with Clone armed starts with no source and fills nothing until you give it one: its outline is drawn in amber and the bar says the newest has no clone source yet — ⌥-drag from it to set one.
- Rectangle fills the box you drag. Ellipse fills only the oval inscribed in it, leaving the box's own corners untouched.
To set a clone source, ⌥-drag from the region to the patch you want it filled from. The source is the same shape and size, wherever you dragged to, blended in at the region's edge so the seam is not a hard cut. A sourced region shows a second, brighter outline at its source with a dashed line connecting the two. ⌥-dragging from a healing region turns it into a clone; one ⌘Z puts both the mode and the source back.
Reach for Clone where Heal smears: a repeating pattern such as brickwork or a fence, or an edge that has to stay straight.
A Heal region whose box covers more than about 6% of the frame is not filled, and nothing says so. The region stays on the canvas with its outline, the bar still counts it and the Changes tab still lists it, but the photograph under it has not changed. Blending over that much area would make an obvious blur patch. Draw the region smaller, or use Clone, which has no such limit because it copies pixels rather than blending them.
The AI lasso has the same limit, counted over every loop on the frame together. If the loops' filled area adds up to more than that, none of them is filled, though the bar still counts them as 2 lasso paths · filled at render, for two loops. Draw a tighter loop around less, or take the area out with Clone.
Find distractions
Find distractions looks at the frame for small, off-centre spots that pull the eye, and proposes up to four of them at once as clean regions. It is one undoable action — a batch, not a one-by-one list — and when nothing stood out it says so plainly rather than forcing a suggestion. Every region it adds is an ordinary Heal region you can remove or redraw. Run it before you crop or correct the frame; the first caution on this page says why.
The AI lasso
AI lasso is for anything a rectangle does not fit: a sign, a reflection, a person at the edge of the frame.
- Press AI lasso. The bar reads Drag a loop around something to clean it out.
- Drag a freehand loop around it. Letting go ends the drawing, not the tool: the loop stays on the canvas as a draft, and the bar reads Loop drawn · Enter applies, Esc cancels.
- Press
↩, or the AI lasso tool again, to apply it.Escthrows the draft away without writing anything.
Loop before you crop or correct the frame, for the reason in the first caution on this page.
Draw roughly. Vixlo also finds the frame's subject, on your Mac, and treats every loop on the frame together, each widened a little. If that outline touches the subject anywhere, the fill is only the part of the subject inside it: the subject's real edge replaces your line, and whatever else the loops enclose, or any other loop, is left alone. Only when no loop touches the subject is the fill exactly the loops you drew. The fill is Heal's and has Heal's size limit, under Heal or Clone, Rectangle or Ellipse above. A loop too small to mean anything — a stray click, a slip of the trackpad — is refused with a message in the bar rather than stored.
Applied loops are drawn as a dashed outline, the bar counts them (2 lasso paths · filled at render) and offers Clear, and each is a line in the Changes tab.
A loop that reaches the subject fills the subject and nothing else. Circle a sign beside a person and let the line touch a shoulder, and the strip of shoulder inside the loop is filled while the sign stays. Keep every loop a small margin clear of the subject, or use a Spot clean rectangle or ellipse, which never snaps to it.
The AI lasso takes something out of the frame. The Lasso row on the Local tab draws the same kind of loop for the opposite purpose — to scope the sliders to what is inside it. See Local: masks.