Photoshop MSU Image Restoration is a great plugin for Photoshop CS2 and CS3 (probably also working in other versions) to erase unwanted objects such as accidental people in photo or in my case I wanted to remove ugly trolleybus wires which really corrupted photo of cool big board in Warsaw. (You can have a look at full size processed photo in my Flickr page).

It could also be used to repair areas of photo with scratches, spots, other damages. As developers from MSU Graphics & Media Lab wrote in MSU Image Restoration page“The filter filling in picked out damaged area using only space data”. Although it is the first beta version (0.9b) the plugin worked for me perfectly. It seems to me that I couldn’t make it for reasonable time with standard Photoshop tools.

After download (file size 60 KB in ZIP), install plugin by extracting file from archive in the folder “Plug-Ins” (C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS3\Plug-Ins\Filters). Plug-in should appear in menu Filter -> MSU Graphics & Media Lab (at the very bottom).

The use of the plugin is rather simple.

1. Open image in Photoshop

2. Select the object or area to erase/restore with any of Selection tools. I’d recommend using Pen tool (Lasso, Magic Wand or Quick selection tool in Photoshop CS3). Apply Feather for better results.
You could also make selection by using Quick Mask (press Q) and painting undesirable area black with Brush.

3. Apply MSU Image restoration (Filter ->MSU Graphics and Media Lab-> MSU Image restoration)

It works perfectly even with default settings. But you can experiment if you’d like to.

Block radius (radius of typical element of damaged area) varies from 1 to 10.

Search radius (radius of similar block of search area) value could be greater or alike Block radius value plus 4.
Plug-in works longer with the greater block and search radius.

I don’t recommend to use Full search options (similar blocks looks for full image) since it works really really slow.