1. A method for processing an exemplar prior to texture synthesis, comprising: generating an appearance vector for a pixel in the exemplar by using information from a spatial neighborhood of the pixel, the appearance vector in a first appearance space having a first number of dimensions; 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