I see.  But then functionally it's merely replicating the string input.  Why not pass that as a string as is currently allowed, and free up the `Image`?  If it's a question of I/O time and internal efficiency that kind of makes sense, except that you are also paying the (fairly non-negligible) cost of initializing an `ImageCorrFunc` each time you want the noise padding, which I definitely bet trumps I/O in these cases.