Fix it in the order that stops you doing it twice

Why order matters at all

Most people repair in the order they notice things. They see a bad hand, fix it. Then they notice the background doorway is geometrically impossible, fix that, and the fix changes the light on the arm, so the hand needs doing again. Then they grade the image, and the graded version reveals a seam around the hand that was invisible before.

Every one of those is a repeat of work already done. An order exists that prevents it, and it comes from one principle: fix the things that change the most pixels first.

The order

1. Structure. Anything that is geometrically wrong across a large area: a wall that does not meet the floor, a table with an impossible edge, a limb emerging from the wrong place. These need large masks and a high denoise, so they overwrite everything nearby.

2. Large removals and additions. Taking out an object, adding one. Same reason: large area, large change.

3. Faces and hands. The expensive, attention-demanding work. It comes after structure because a structural fix next to a face will disturb it.

4. Edges and boundaries. Where two things meet: hair against background, a product against a surface, a sleeve against an arm. These are small masks at moderate denoise.

5. Small objects and details. Jewellery, buttons, cutlery, the stems of glasses, wristwatches.

6. Global grade and grain. Contrast, colour, vignette, grain, sharpening. Always last, and always on a flattened copy, because grain applied before a repair means the repaired patch has no grain and shows.

The estimate, written down

Before starting, list the faults with minutes against each: the keeper checklist ended with this and it matters more here.

seed 418, base render
  1 doorway geometry, upper right      structure    8
  2 remove stray object on table       removal      4
  3 both hands                         hands       14
  4 face, slight asymmetry at 3/4      face         6
  5 bangle merging into wrist          edge         4
  6 chilli stems, foreground           detail       5
  7 grade, grain                       global       6
                                                   47

Forty-seven minutes is a normal figure for a hero image and a useful one to know, because it is what you are quoting for. If the list exceeds ninety minutes, go back to the contact sheet: a better base render is a minute away and will cost half as much to finish.

Working non-destructively

Every repair happens on a copy. The practical arrangement:

gen/v01/00418-base.png          never touched
work/hero.xcf                   layered file, repairs as layers
deliver/hero-v03.jpg            flattened output

In GIMP, Krita or Photopea, each inpainted region comes back as its own layer with a mask. That way a repair you later dislike is one layer to delete, rather than a reason to start again. It also means that when the client asks on Thursday whether the earlier hand was better, you can show them in four seconds.

The habit that costs people whole afternoons is inpainting in the generator, saving over the file, inpainting again, saving over it. Six passes later something is wrong and there is no way back to pass three.

Two failures specific to repair

The patch that does not belong. An inpainted region regenerated at full resolution often comes back sharper, more contrasty and slightly differently coloured than its surroundings, because it was denoised with a different amount of context. It looks pasted. The fix is a low-denoise pass over the joint afterwards: mask a ring around the repaired area at 0.25 and let the model reconcile it.

Drift across many repairs. Twelve inpainting passes each shift the local colour slightly, and after twelve the image has a subtly uneven quality that no single region explains. This is why the grade goes last: a single global correction over an image with accumulated local drift fixes far less than people expect. Keep the number of passes down, use larger masks rather than many small ones, and check the whole image at 50% every few repairs rather than staying zoomed in.

When to stop

There is a point where repair stops improving the picture and starts sanding it flat. The signal is that you are fixing things nobody would notice: a slightly odd fold in fabric, an unconvincing reflection in a background window at 400% zoom.

View at 100% and at the delivered size. If a fault is invisible at both, it is not a fault. Clients do not zoom to 400%, and an image that has been repaired into perfect smoothness has usually lost the incidental irregularity that made it look like a photograph in the first place.