1. A method for processing an exemplar prior to texture synthesis, comprising: using a computer to perform the following: defining a neighborhood of pixels in the exemplar, the neighborhood of pixels including a selected pixel at a center of the neighborhood of pixels; generating an appearance vector for the selected pixel by using information from pixels in the neighborhood of pixels that are in a spatial neighborhood immediately surrounding the selected pixel, the appearance vector in a first appearance space having a first number of dimensions; assigning weights to each pixel in the neighborhood of pixels other than the selected pixel such that a distance weight value of each pixel is dependent only on a distance from that pixel to the selected pixel; and applying dimensionality reduction to the appearance vector to produce a dimensionality-reduced transformed exemplar that is used as input to the texture synthesis, wherein the dimensionality-reduced transformed exemplar is in a second appearance space that is Euclidean and having a lower number of dimensions than the first appearance space.