New Orleans photography » A Big Easy photo blog

In the lull between the last few weeks of craze before the next few weeks of insanity kicks in, I’ve taken advantage of some down time to backup, defrag and upgrade — including Adobe CS5. If you missed the live debut of Photoshop’s content-aware fill, this is what all the hype is about:

To test, I took a recent SOOC (straight out of the camera) original image:

I used CS5 to enhance the digital file as part of my usual workflow. Then I added a layer of texture to make the grunge wall behind my subject even more interesting:

Then I called my kids over to watch what they call “Stupid Photoshop Tricks.” I do this for two reasons: 1.) because it’s fun and 2.) because I think it’s important for kids to see how much manipulation goes into the images that bombard them. It’s just a healthy dose of realism.

I selected my subject:

And to my daughter’s horror (and her brother’s delight,) I hit the “delete” key:

The dialog box that came up had “content-aware” selected as default. I hit okay. And whereas my previous version of CS3 would have left the area inside the selection a blank, erased field of white for me to painstakingly recreate, CS5 took less than a minute to process a suggested fill for me:

Granted, it isn’t perfect; the lines in the brick walkway don’t exactly add up, for example. But as I selected the clone tool to fix them, I was surprised and thrilled to find in CS5, the clone tool shows me a mirror image of what I’m about to stamp — invaluable hours saved trying to blindly line-up matching pixels!

I did a little bit more to clean up the content aware, but very quickly and without spending too much thought:

And then, of course, I hit open apple-Z to step backward and reinsert my beautiful sunshine, this time within an altered, content-aware filled format:

A trained eye could easily spot the hurried indifference, but all told the whole process took us a little over three minutes. Amazing!