Crop and retouch

The Crop tab

The tab has three sections: CROP, ROTATE and PERSPECTIVE. Reset all, at the bottom, puts all three back at once.

Cropping

1. Click Crop. The whole frame shows, with the area outside the crop shaded and a rule-of-thirds grid inside it. The button now reads Done.
2. Adjust the crop:
   • Drag a corner or an edge to resize it.
   • Drag inside the rectangle to move it.
   • Drag anywhere outside the rectangle to draw a new crop from that point.
   • Click Draw, then drag anywhere on the picture, inside the crop too, to draw a new one from where you press. This is the way to start over when the crop already fills the frame. Draw lets go after the one drag, or when you press Esc.
   • Hold Alt as you drag inside the rectangle to draw a new crop the same way. Some desktops keep Alt and a drag for moving windows; use Draw there.
3. Click Done, press Esc, or switch to another tab. The picture shows cropped. With Draw, Level, or a guide in hand, the first Esc puts it down and the next leaves the crop.

Aspect holds the crop to a shape:

A frame with no crop of its own opens its crop at Original, so dragging a corner keeps the frame's shape; only opening the crop leaves the frame's edit as it was. The Aspect row in Settings changes that: Last used opens every uncropped frame at the aspect you last picked from the list, kept from one session to the next, and Free at any shape. A frame you have cropped keeps its own crop and aspect, and Reset all puts a frame back to no crop.

Portrait means the crop is tall: on, 3:2 becomes 2:3. It reads the same way under Original, a ratio and Custom, so on a photo shot on end it is on for the frame's own shape. Under Free the crop can be any shape, so the switch is greyed and does nothing.

A ratio picked when the aspect was Free or Original starts the way the photo is: tall on a photo shot on end, wide otherwise. A ratio picked over another keeps the switch as you left it.

When you pick another ratio or turn Portrait, the crop takes the new shape around the same center and keeps about the same area, so turning Portrait twice gives back the crop you had. When you change the angle, the crop stays where it is if it still fits; if not, it shrinks to fit around the same center. While the Angle slider moves, by drag, wheel, or key, a grid lies over the picture so a horizon or an edge can be brought level against its lines; it goes when the slider rests.

Straightening

In ROTATE:

• Level gives you a ruler. Drag along something in the picture that should be level or upright, such as a horizon or a wall. The picture turns to straighten it. greycard takes whichever is nearer: level or upright.
• Auto level does the same by itself: it finds the longest straight line near level or upright, a horizon or a wall, and turns the picture to it. Nothing happens when no line stands out.
• Angle turns the picture by hand, −45° to +45°.

Turning and mirroring

The row of four icon buttons in ROTATE (rest the pointer on one for its name, "Rotate left: part of the edit" and so on):

• turn a quarter left
• turn a quarter right
• mirror left to right (Flip)
• mirror top to bottom (Flip vertical)

These are part of the edit, and Reset all undoes them.

The Turn left and Turn right buttons under the row are different. They fix a frame the camera recorded the wrong way up. They are not part of the edit: Reset all leaves them. They act on every selected frame. The [ and ] keys do the same.

Perspective

Use this when the camera was tilted, so that the sides of a building lean in, or a facade shot from one side narrows toward one end.

Vertical and Horizontal (each −40° to +40°) correct the tilt by hand.

The guide finds them for you:

1. Click Verticals or Horizontals.
2. Drag a line along an edge in the picture that should run straight up (or straight across), such as the side of a building.
3. Drag a second line along another such edge, away from the first.

greycard sets the angle and the tilt so that both lines run true. If the two lines tell it nothing (the same line twice, for example), the status line says "the guide needs two different lines" and the tool stays in your hand. Escape puts Level or a guide down.

Correcting perspective leaves empty corners. Crop them away afterward.

The Retouch tab

RETOUCH has three tools:

The section's switch turns every repair off at once, for a before and after.

Making a repair

1. Click Heal, Clone, or Fill. The pointer shows the repair's size and where its soft edge begins.
2. Click on a spot, or drag over a longer flaw.
3. Click the tool's button again, or press Esc, when you are done.

While a tool is in hand, the mouse wheel changes the size, one step a click; a touchpad scroll changes it by as many steps as the same distance on a wheel. Ctrl with the wheel still zooms. To move the picture without putting the tool down, as when working over dust at 200%, hold Space or Shift and drag.

For Heal and Clone, greycard chooses where to copy from. To change it, choose the repair in the list with the tool in hand. Two pins show the repair and its source, joined by a line. Drag the source pin to copy from somewhere else, or the repair's pin to move the repair.

The repair's settings

Size, Feather and Opacity show while a tool is in hand. They set the next repair. With a repair chosen in the list, they change that one instead:

• Size (0.2% to 30% of the frame).
• Feather (0 to 100%, default 30%): how soft the edge is.
• Opacity (0 to 100%, default 100%): how strongly the repair covers what is under it.

The repair list

Each repair is listed by its tool and a number, such as "Heal 1" or "Fill 2".

• Click a repair to choose it. Its outline and the start of its soft edge are drawn on the picture.
• The bin icon on the chosen row deletes it.
• Escape lets go of the chosen repair.

Fill and its model

Fill runs a learned model. It takes a second or more to fill an area, and the status line says when it is working ("the fill model is at work on Fill 3").

The model downloads the first time you choose Fill: about 210 MB, once. greycard shows you its license first. If a sidecar with a fill opens on a machine without the model, the area is left as it was until the model is downloaded, and the status line says so.

There are two engines. LaMa fills on any machine and at any size. On a machine with a GPU, the generative remove makes up what was behind what you remove, working in a window around the area up to 1024 pixels a side; a window up to four times that is scaled down to it and back, and a bigger one is still LaMa's.

With Fill in hand, or a Fill chosen in the list, three buttons above the list say what makes it:

• Patch fills from the picture around the area, at once, on any machine.
• Fast runs the generative remove in four steps: a few seconds, but rougher on large areas. It is a further 390 MB beside the remove.
• Best runs the generative remove in full, 25 steps.

The choice changes the Fill chosen and is kept for the next one, and the Settings sheet's Editing category has it too. Before you choose, it is Best, or Fast on a machine whose GPU shares its memory, where Best takes a minute on a recent Mac and up to four on an M1, and Fast a quarter of that; the first fill after a launch adds the model's load, a minute or so on an M1. Where the GPU shares 16 GB or more, the load starts the moment you take Fill in hand, so it runs while you draw. The status line says "preparing..." while it lasts, as it does whenever a model takes more than a moment to load. Choosing one whose model is not downloaded offers the download; choose it again once it is here. On a machine without a GPU the two removes are greyed, and the tooltip says why. The generative remove's models are 16-bit, so the GPU must run 16-bit floats in its shaders: NVIDIA cards before the GTX 16 and RTX 20 series (a GTX 1080, say) cannot, and a fill asked of them fails at once with the log saying so; Patch still works there. A Fill drawn before a model arrived keeps what made it until you choose again.

The generative remove is a second download, 5.5 GB under the CreativeML Open RAIL++-M license, offered once the first time you choose Fill with LaMa in hand. Not now keeps LaMa. A fill it made opens on a machine without it, or without a GPU, left as it was.

Every fill takes on the photo's grain, measured around the area, so it does not stand out as a smooth patch.

A frame with several generative fills to make shows its picture as soon as it develops, each fill still to come outlined faintly where it will go, and the fills land one by one after it. The status line counts them ("Fill 5, 4 of 15") and its bar shows the one being made. Leaving for the Library pauses them; coming back goes on.

A fill the generative remove made has Another on its row in the list: each press makes a new version of it, and undo takes you back to the last one.