Adobe Photoshop CS5 Content Aware Fill

I’ve been working with the new Photoshop content aware fill feature for a couple of days now. This feature is supposed to revolutionize photo editing. You can select anything in an image, hit delete, and photoshop will replace it with appropriate material from the background, like the deleted subject was never there in the first place.

Before CS5 was released, I watched some YouTube videos they released; They promised it would be a game-changer. I can assure you that in reality it’s just not that awesome. Don’t get me wrong… It is very cool, and a big time saver, but it just doesn’t work as perfectly as that video makes it seem.

Here is a shot I edited using the content aware feature (original is #6, HERE):

This image had a large electrical tower in the middle right, and wires going through across both sides of the image. I spent 20 minutes editing them out. It is by no means a perfect job. It’s just meant to be an experiment with the new tools.

I found that the content aware fill (used with the spot heal brush) worked very well to remove the large tower, but the wires were more difficult. I couldn’t just swipe the tool across the wires and be done. I had to do each wire in small bits. After finishing with the spot heal brush, I had to go over it all again with the clone stamper to clean up an artifacts that it left behind.

I found that it worked best removing smaller vertical items, but long horizontal items seemed to trip it up. I also realize that this was a particularly difficult background to work with. It does an amazing job of filling in background textures and colors in a natural way. It just needs a little more work afterwards to make it perfect. It was certainly a time saver, though. The last time I did edits like this (same tree!), it took me hours.

I should also add that I am NOT a Photoshop expert, and it is possible that I am missing some settings that will improve how it works.

Overall, I am very impressed with Photoshop CS5. I am looking forward to trying out some of the other new features. Maybe I’ll try the “puppet warp” next…

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