If your photograph is unfortunately damaged by a large gap or hole, as in the missing corner shown in the image below, you’ll have to perform some reconstructive surgery. The larger the void and the more detail surrounding it, the trickier the reconstruction will be. You can certainly fall back on cropping as a crutch in order to minimize the opening—depending on its location, of course. But if you’re lucky, the missing area will be in a background or piece of clothing that is at least manageably repairable.
Type 1: Repair with photoshop
To start, make a selection from a nearby area that is appropriate to fill in the void. If you’re replacing with trees and shrubs, copy from an area of trees and shrubs. If you’re replacing part of a garment, select from another area of the garment. Copy the selection to a new layer, move it into place over the gap, and use the Transform tool (found under the Edit menu) to rotate, resize and shape the element to fit appropriately over the hole. Then, use the Patch tool (be sure it’s set to Content-Aware and Sample All Layers) overlapping the edges of the patch in order to make it blend seamlessly into the background. This generally does a great job of softening the hard edges from the copy/paste patch.
Another way to fill gaps in the image is with the Paint Bucket. This approach works best if you’re repairing a portion of the image without many changes in shape, texture or detail.
To use it, start with the lasso tool to draw a selection around the void, then activate the Paint Bucket and option-click (or alt-click) to select an appropriate color from a nearby area of the image. Click inside the selection to fill it with the paint color, then again switch to the patch tool. Ensure it is still set to Content Aware mode in the Options bar. (If the Options bar does not show by default at the top of the Photoshop window, turn it on under the Window menu by clicking on Options so that a checkmark appears. Then, click and drag as before to choose an appropriate area nearby to fill in the texture of the patch and blend it with the previously established color.)
Type 2: Smart repair using imgkits
Compared with the manual use of photoshop software, the biggest advantage of imgkits is that you only need to upload photos. The artificial intelligence system will automatically identify the wrinkles, spots, missing, color and other defects of the uploaded photos, and the photos can be repaired in 1 minute.
