PhotoFiltre Forum

Hello,
I have a photo (jpg) which I am trying to modify with the Smudge tool, and I am having some strange difficulty. I have used the Smudge tool many times on other photos, to great effect, and am vary familiar with how it works. But I have one particular photo on which the Smudge tool seems to have no effect whatsoever. (Well, at least on the part of it I want it to work!)

This is a photo of the 2017 solar eclipse, which I added to a "slideshow" that runs on my computer all the time. Unfortunately, the photo was nearly square, while my monitor is a large widescreen model, with a resolution of 1920x1080. So in order to have the photo "fill out" the screen, I increased the canvas size and used the Eyedropper tool to make the extra canvas as black as the darkest part of the background of the image. This made it workable for the slideshow, but the sun's coronal glare is "chopped off" by black, along the left side of what was the original image.

I thought I could fix this easily by using the Smudge tool to drag some of the glare leftward, effectively recreating what the image would have looked like had it not been chopped off horizontally. But the Smudge tool will not cooperate with me. Anytime I try to smudge into the black area, nothing happens. Smudging still works just fine where I do NOT want it -- as in, the areas belonging to the original image -- but there is absolutely no effect on the black part of the canvas. How can I make this work? I am using PhotoFiltre 6.

Hi
your problem is too abstract for me to be understood without an image.
Give us a link to your image on a web host, and we will try to find an issue.

Here, I believe this will work:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1pw_Oc ... lK_BAHOuMx

Envision a relatively square image, of the area centered on the eclipse. The completely black area off to the left is the extra part I added when I enlarged the canvas. What I want to do is use the Smudge tool to drag some of the coronal glare to the left, into the all-black area. But it refuses to let me, the black area stays unchanged.

It works and the smurge tool too.
Make a copy and try with a radius like 100 and a pressure max, (full right).
Then you can see it works. After you can reduce pressure or adjust radius as you like it.
But i'm not sure it is the best way. For my practice i would better use the clone stamp tool
with a large radius and play with pressure, perhaps check "diffuse" to get more light dust.
The first attempt is not always the best. Keep going, you will success.

The Airbrush tool isn't what I had in mind, but that does work. The Smudge tool doesn't have "pressure" settings. But taking a cue from what you said, I tried bumping up the "Opacity" on the Smudge tool, and with it all the way to 100%, it does work -- but it's so stark and defined that I can't use it. Pulling it back to even 99% makes it all but invisible, just the first couple of pixels show up. Typically, the Smudge tool is good for blending things together, making a smoother transition from one to the other (as in, from grey to utter black). But with the Opacity adjusted so high, it no longer serves that purpose. I'll have to find another way.

I didn't spoke about Airbrush tool, but the "Clone stamp tool".
It works like a stamp to clone step by step any area, or like a brush if "Fixed" is not check
The best you should try is the Studio (shareware) or PF 7 (freeware) version of PhotoFiltre.
Ok they work with Layers, but that can be a real advantage in many situations,
and above all these versions offer more efficient tools and more controls.