How to remove objects in images with GIMP + G'MIC

  • G'MIC is a tool that is available for GIMP.
  • Among other things, it allows you to delete objects.
Pablinux

3 minutes

Removing objects with G'MIC in GIMP

Sometimes we take a photo we love, but it has a small problem we want to make disappear. For example, when we're at the beach, we want to appear alone, and there's someone there who shouldn't be. There are many ways to remove objects in images, and tools like Krita or Photopea are perfectly capable of doing so. But if you use GIMP, one of the best options is G'MIC.

Resynthesizer has also been around for a long time, but that plugin, which was a revolution when it came out, has now fallen far behind other alternatives. Among them, G'MIC, which is capable of much more, but today We are going to explain how to delete objects with this plugin. And best of all, from GIMP.

Object removal process using G'MIC in GIMP

The process to follow would be as follows:

  1. The first thing is to install the plugin. The necessary information is usually in the official repositories of many Linux distributions, and the packages would be gmic y gmic-qt. It is also in Flatub.
  2. Once installed, if we had GIMP open, we restart it.
  3. Now we open the image with the unwanted object.
  4. What we need to do is select that object and paint on it. There are several ways to do this in GIMP:
    • We click on the brush tool, select a hard brush that doesn't blur edges, and paint the object.
    • We select the entire shape of the unwanted object with the free selection tool, put a color in the color box, drag the box and drop it on top of the silhouette.
    • Whatever we choose, the silhouette should be painted in one color and have hard edges.

Painted object

  1. Now we open G'MIC, which is in the Filters menu. If for some reason you can't find it, the Shift + / combination is your best friend.
  2. In the options on the left we choose some “Inpainting”.

Inpainting in G'MIC

  1. If it detects the color, it will automatically remove the object on its first attempt. If it doesn't detect it, we can click the "Mask Color" box and select the color from the image. If we don't like the object removal, we can choose other Inpainting options. We can also configure various options, among which I recommend paying attention to "Mask Dilation."
  2. We click accept and that would be all.

Some details

Keep in mind that the preview isn't always faithful to the final result; it's an approximation. If the final result isn't what you wanted, undo the changes in the GIMP window and try again. The more precise you are with your selections and fine-tuning, the better the result will be.

If you look at the header example, the original image by Alex Azabache I had a person disappear by just choosing “Inpainting [Multi-Scale]” and setting “Mask Dilation” to 3. With the right settings, there won’t be any object we can’t remove.