Quick user's guide to the Resynthesizer plugins for GIMP - bootchk/resynthesizer GitHub Wiki
The plugins in the suite do seemingly unrelated things.
The suite provides these menu items in the GIMP menus:
Enhance>Heal selection...
Best described as "retouch." Like the heal tool, but automatic. Replaces the selection to look like its surroundings. Probably the most popular and useful. Use it to make unwanted objects disappear.
Enhance>Heal transparency...
Like above, but you don't need to select anything, it heals every transparent pixel.
Enhance>Uncrop...
Makes the canvas larger and heals the new transparent border. Not exactly the inverse of cropping, but almost: reconstructs what might have been cropped earlier. It doesn't "blow up" the image, it keeps the existing image the same size and grows the image around its edges.
Enhance>Sharpen by synthesis...
Sharpening that might give more plausible detail. Slower than other sharpens.
Enhance>Enlarge & sharpen...
Enlarge (increase the resolution) and sharpen. Might restore more plausible detail than simple scaling up and using other sharpens.
Map>Style...
Transfers the 'style' of one image to another. Use it for "painterly" effects.
Render>Texture..
Creates a new image having the texture from another image. In other words, a seamless, irregular wallpaper (if the source image is smaller.)
You can also use Map>Resynthesize to create tiles, and then you can create a regular but seamless pattern.
Edit>Fill with pattern seamless...
Somewhat similar to Render>Texture. Fills with an irregular pattern from another image. Note this is in the Edit menu, not the Filter menu. Original written by RobA.
Map>Resynthesize...
A control panel. The hardest to understand, but the most powerful. Displays every control of the Resynthesizer engine. Here, you can experiment with other uses of the algorithm.
To use the control panel, you usually:
- first create other layers and select areas in them,
- start the control panel,
- choose those layers in the control panel,
- choose other parameters,
- finally choose OK to submit to the engine.
But you must know specific steps to get one of the many effects. That's what the other plugins do automatically, they "know" the steps. The other plugins can all be replicated by specific steps using the control panel plugin.
One obscure use of the control panel is to make seamlessly tileable tiles. If you tile the plane with such tiles, you can still see that there are rows and columns, but there are no hard edge between the tiles. (Future: make this use another plugin.)
Notes about the suite
The above are plugins written in Python.
They are all based on one powerful algorithm, which is also a plugin, but written in C. That plugin is the "engine."
A very commmon mistake is to improperly install the engine plugin. Then the Python plugins fail, giving a Python traceback ending with the error from GIMP: "error: procedure not found." This means GIMP could not find the PDB procedure named "plug-in-resynthesizer", which is the engine plugin.