One of CS5’s Coolest Tools

Yes you are on the right blog posting. It looks a whole lot like yesterdays. Well... It kind of is. The above image is the after and the image below is the before. In addition to yesterdays sky darkening application, today is about one of the most talked about tools in Photoshop CS5. Content Aware Fill.

In CS4 Adobe introduced Content Aware Scaling which was really cool for reframing and image to a different size format, completing pano’s, and expanding images for gallery wraps. Content Aware Fill amps that up another notch.

When I took this image there were some very bright lights illuminating the ramp as shown by my shadow in the image above. As I have only had CS5 loaded on my laptop for a couple of days, I thought it would be fitting to take Content Aware Fill for a spin.

First thing is to make a selection around the object you want to fill. The selection can be a loose lasso close to the edge as shown at right.
The Content-Aware Fill is a function of the Fill dialog found under the Edit Menu. Click the OK and let it do its thing.

I was not sure what to expect because I have heard that this function is far from perfect. In this situation it performed very well.


The expansion joint gave it a little grief but all in all I was very happy for how it performed. You can see in the image to the right, the joint was somewhat displaced. This was a small fix by selecting the disjointed line (sorry) and moved it over to the correct position.

Once it was in position a very small amount of cloning at a low opacity would touch up the fill area.

So if the tool is not the end all to our fill problems, the amount of computational processing that is going on is simply staggering. It truly creates something from nothing. Smoke and mirrors I say, smoke and mirrors!


Have another great day and take care... Doug