You can get recoverjpeg 2.0 and its cryptographic signature.

With this plugin, you can create tileable textures, remap textures or remove objects from an image in a very easy way.

I have tested the latest feature (removing objects from [...]]]> Once in a while, I find a very good plugin for GIMP (the GNU image manipulation program). The last one I stumbled upon was the resynthesizer plugin.

With this plugin, you can create tileable textures, remap textures or remove objects from an image in a very easy way.

I have tested the latest feature (removing objects from an image) on two different images (credits to Nadine).

Removing a scratch from a girl’s skin

As you can see in the image below, this (otherwise gorgeous) friend of mine has an ugly scratch on her back:

If you select (very roughly) the scratch and ask for its removal using the resynthesizer plugin, it’s gone:

Yes, that’s it. It has been replaced by new skin automatically.

Removing a plane from the sky

I also tried it on a bigger image:

By very roughly selecting the plane, do you think it will be possible to remove it? Here is the result:

Impressive, eh? Out of curiosity, I made GIMP compute the difference between both images. Here is the result:

Yes, you can even use this plugin, after applying the right black and white threshold (1-255 is white, 0 is black), to get an alpha mask of the plane.

I hope that this plugin will be included in the next version of GIMP.

Oh, of course, GIMP and the resynthesizer plugin are both available as Free Software.

So I [...]]]> When doing some heavy 3D rendering with Blender, I realized that one of my animation was going to take 53 hours to render. Existing distributed rendering systems such as DrQueue were fine but require that some software other than Blender or basic interpreters (such as Python or Perl) is installed on the contributing machines.

So I wrote a simple Python script called blenderdist.py which only needs blender and python to run. A server is launched with:


% python blenderdist.py --server PORT JOBDIR RENDERDIR


and will monitor the status of job files (three lines each, the blender file, the first frame to render and the last one to render) in JOBDIR. Resulting frames are placed under RENDERDIR/jobname. Job names have to end with .job and if a file named JOBNAME.job.suspend is present, its rendering is suspended to allow urgent jobs to be rendered first.

Clients are launched with:


% python blenderdist.py --client HOST PORT


The server constantly monitors its source code. Whenever the Python script changes, the server relaunches itself (without loosing its state saved in a checkpoint file) and the next time the clients connect to it they will receive the new version of the program and relaunch themselves too.

I have currently a dozen machines working as I type, most of them out of my control. Some friends of mine have agreed to run the script and are contributing CPU cycles for my rendering. This proves to be very helpful. The program is much less powerful than generic ones such as DrQueue, but it does not require that disk space is shared between machines or setting up complex scripts. It just gets the job done.

Note: as this script has been written for a one-time shot need, I place it under the public domain, do whatever you want with it.