Does digiKam have something like smart selection?

Software digiKam
1

I’ve been playing around with Adobe Elements and it turned out to be an immediate disappointment. The Organizer is worthless (tagging stinks for one thing) and most of the Editor functions are already in digiKam. But there is one singly function that I wonder if digiKam has something similar or has planned for the future.

It is the Remove Object feature. It seems to work best with simple backgrounds. I used it to remove a birdbath in a photo of the backyard to see if it worked. I used the Auto wand to draw a box around a white birdbath in the lawn and the lasso magically snapped around the fuzzy outline of it. I clicked “Remove Object and it was gone. But what seemed truly magical is the algorithm apparently looked at the background around it and guessed what the grass behind it would look like, filled it in, even recreating some of the shading patterns I could see.

I wouldn’t pay for Elements or switch for just this one feature, but I sure wish digiKam had something like it. Maybe it does but I can’t find a addon for it.

2

You can try Healing Clone tool in digiKam.
You may also try Spot Removal feature of darktable

I am sure GIMP or Krita have something similar as well.
All these are open source software.
None of these tools are as automated as Adobe’s probably but normally you don’t use them as often.

1 Like
3

There is a plug in (using Gmic) for Gimp or Krita called in paint. It works quite well for simple backgrounds but for more complicated backgrounds, I have found the results are less predictable. An explanation here:
https://youtu.be/VOPHbSgJUSI

1 Like
4

I want to mention that since posting this I found out Microsoft Paint 3D that come already installed with Windows 10 has “Magic select” that does what I asked about (in a really weird way). It doesn’t work as well, but it was just sitting there waiting for me to discover I had it.

5

Not sure if digiKam has it but I had pretty good results with GIMP’s “Scissors” selection tool. Myself I don’t consider digiKam an edit tool. That does not mean dk is not capable of editing though. If you went through the examples in the manual you would have seen that indeed digiKam can do pretty good edits.