Fix the frame yourself instead of re-rolling it

Why the repair pass exists

A generated still comes back almost right. Six fingers, a warped sign, a doubled earring, a chair leg that passes through the floor. The instinct is to regenerate.

Regenerating is a fresh sample. It may fix the hand. It may also change the face, move the light, lose the wardrobe detail you liked and introduce a new flaw somewhere you were not looking. You are rolling dice on the whole frame to fix one square inch of it.

Repairing is deterministic. You fix the hand and nothing else changes. It takes five minutes, it costs nothing, and the result is exactly what you decided rather than what the sampler decided.

This is the single biggest habit difference between people who ship generative video and people who burn credits.

The order to fix things in

Work from most damaging to least, and stop when the frame is good enough to animate.

1. Hands and contact points. Fingers, where a hand grips an object, where a foot meets the ground. These become worse under motion, never better.
2. Faces. Asymmetric eyes, a wandering pupil, teeth. Small fixes here pay enormously because you are about to watch this face for eight seconds.
3. Text and logos. Almost never fixable by nudging. Either paint them out flat and add real text later in the editor, or accept them.
4. Structural nonsense. A railing that does not connect, a doorframe with three sides, a reflection that does not match. The eye finds these on the second viewing.
5. Duplicated background people. Models produce twins in crowds. One clone stamp each.
6. Edges and halos. Leftover fringing where the model composited badly.

The tools, and the honest free path

• Photopea runs in a browser tab, opens and saves PSD files, and has layers, masks, clone stamp, healing and selection tools that are close enough to Photoshop that the muscle memory transfers. It is the answer for anyone on a machine that cannot run Adobe, which is most of this readership. Free tier is ad-supported and fully functional.
• GIMP if you can install software. Heavier learning curve, no subscription, everything you need.
• Krita is better than GIMP for painting: if the repair involves drawing rather than cloning, use it.
• Photoshop is named here because job ads name it. It is not required for any technique below.
• On a phone: Snapseed’s healing tool handles small removals; Photopea works in a mobile browser badly but it works.

The four operations that do ninety per cent of it

Clone stamp. Copy pixels from one part of the image to another. Removes a duplicated person, a stray object, a bad detail. Sample from a region with the same light and the same texture direction, and use a soft brush.

Healing brush. Like clone, but blends the sampled texture into the destination’s colour and luminance. Better for skin and skies, worse near hard edges, because it drags contrast from across the edge.

Selection plus patch. Lasso the bad area, copy a good area from elsewhere in the same image, paste, flip if needed, mask the edges. This is how you replace a bad hand with a good hand from another generation of the same subject.

Paint on a mask. Almost everything else. Paint black to hide, white to reveal, on a layer mask rather than on the pixels, so you can change your mind.

Inpainting as a repair tool

Most image tools offer generative fill on a masked region. It is useful for the middle case: too big to clone, too small to regenerate.

Two cautions worth carrying. It samples, so it is another dice roll, but a small, cheap, local one, which is a much better bet than re-rolling the whole frame. And the inpainted region comes back through the same autoencoder, so it can be very slightly softer or differently grained than its surroundings. On skin nobody notices. On a hard edge against a flat wall, sometimes they do.

Borrow from your own rejects

Keep the failed generations. When shot four’s still has a perfect face and a ruined hand, and shot two’s still has the same face and a good hand, the hand is a copy-paste away. Same subject, same light, same model: the pieces fit because they came from the same distribution.

This is why the frame library in a later lesson is not administrative tidiness. It is a parts bin.

What not to repair

If the pose is wrong, the composition is wrong, or the light is wrong, stop repairing. Those are structural and you will spend an hour producing a worse result than a new generation with a better prompt. The repair pass is for local flaws in a frame that is fundamentally right.

The test: can you describe the fix as a shape you could draw around? If yes, repair. If the answer involves the whole frame, regenerate.

Today: take your worst nearly-good still, open it in Photopea, and fix exactly one thing with the clone stamp. Time yourself. Compare that against the cost of four more generations.