Why the first rectangle starts there
Orange or yellow camera dates often carry a dark outline and a soft antialiased fringe. The rectangle must include all three, not merely the bright cores of the numbers.
The opening position is a convenience, not detection. Move and resize it to the real timestamp; the tool does not claim to recognise a date by reading the picture.
A date over sky, wall or soft ground is a strong local repair. A date crossing a face or a unique object is missing-picture reconstruction and should be judged with the compare control at full size.
The boundary of the fill
- No invisible original survives underneath burned-in text.The fill estimates a plausible surface from nearby pixels; it does not reveal a hidden layer.
- Busy structure is not a flat-ground job.When letters cross a face, hand, product edge or unique texture, a small automatic fill may redraw the wrong thing convincingly.
Questions before applying the fill
- What decides whether the filled area looks natural?
- The ground around the box. Flat sky, painted walls and soft out-of-focus areas provide consistent evidence. Faces, hands, lettering, grids and unique objects require structure the surrounding pixels may not contain.
- Should the box touch the letters?
- Give every glyph a small margin so antialiasing, shadow and outline are included. A box clipped to the visible dark core leaves a pale or coloured trace around the fill.
- Can I undo a bad pass?
- Yes. Box geometry and fill operations are kept as reversible steps, and holding the compare control shows the frame as it arrived.