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Photoshop CS5 - Content-Aware Fill
Techniques
28 April 2010 17:19
It won’t be long before boxed copies of Photoshop CS5 start hitting the UK shelves and for those running CS2 or later, (CS3 or CS4), it’s likely to present a tempting upgrade for £187. There are plenty of new tools and features to get excited about, both in Camera RAW and Photoshop itself, however there’s one tool that seems to have gained more hype than any other on the Internet and in our forum and that’s Adobe’s all-new Content-Aware Fill command.
Content-Aware Fill is a retouching command that’s going to be extremely useful when it comes to cloning and healing images. It shares a few similarities to the Patch tool in that it can be used with Selections but instead of moving a Selection over an area or pixels that you want to use for replacement, Content-Aware Fill carefully examines the area around the Spot Healing brush or Selection and automatically fills it with the most relevant pixels for the best, seamless results. The first time we saw it being used was on an Adobe online video and it looked very impressive. When our pre-release copy of CS5 arrived in the office we couldn’t wait to see if this latest feature was as good as it promised, so we loaded it up and gave it a try.
We’re given two methods of using the new command in CS5: heading into the toolbox and selecting the Spot Healing brush, we’re given three Type options to choose from in the Options Bar. Proximity Match and Create Texture were both present in CS4 and the all-new Content-Aware Fill Type option is found on the far right.
When the Spot Healing brush is used across areas of different contrast it often results in fuzzy marks or blurred areas. This is the tell-tale sign that you’ve attempted to clone or heal an area. If this happens, the Content-Aware Fill command is the better Type to use because it’s intended to account more fully for the structure and detail of the image elements around the painted area.
Giving Content-Aware Fill a try with the Spot Healing brush revealed how valuable this command will be. (See figure 1). With a Hard Edged 50px brush setup, we ran the brush over a large yellow distraction in our image. The dark grey outline indicated the brushed area and it took four seconds for Content-Aware Fill command to replace the distraction with relevant pixels. The result was impressive and viewing the image at 100% revealed there was hardly a trace that we’d been working on the area.
Using Content-Aware Fill with Selections was also successful. After selecting a distraction in our image with the Lasso tool we hit the Mac shortcut Shift+Backspace to load the Fill dialog, but equally we could have gone to Edit > Fill. After selecting Content-Aware from the Contents we hit OK, and Content-Aware Fill synthesized detail around the Selection and replaced it with relevant pixels. It took a couple of attempts to get the clean, flawless result we were after but it rapidly speeded up the time it took to clone a tricky and complex area that we would have otherwise cloned with a combination of the retouching tools. On the whole, the Content-Aware Fill command will work better in some areas of your images than others, so it will never replace the retouching tools in the toolbox. From our early testing it worked well in the majority of images and will benefit photographers or retouchers who regularly need to remove tricky obstructions or distractions out of the frame.
To read up on the full Photoshop CS5 review, make sure you get the Digital Photo June 2010 issue, due on-sale from May 19th. Of course if you don’t want the hassle of going out and buying it off the shelf, why not have it delivered to your door for free by purchasing a yearly subscription. To find out about our latest magazine offers, click here.