Emmett Lollis+Content Aware Features in Photoshop CS5
About content aware in Photoshop
Photoshop has provided us with a giant leap forward with new tools and features which make image editing a snap compared to the early years. The new features we will be focusing on today are content aware fill, and content aware healing (spot healing brush).
What is content aware?
Content aware technology is an amazing advancement in Photoshop technology. The content aware algorithms actually look at the big picture including the surrounding content. It has the ability to compute a nearly seamless integration of replaced content with it's surrounding pixels. In the past, if we wanted to get rid of an object or patch things up, we had to use the clone stamp which had a few issues. The clone stamp tool simply copied one area of the image over the patched area which had a tendency to create repeating patterns which were easily detectable and quite annoying.
Using content aware fill
I've decided to use one of my storm chasing photos to illustrate the usefulness of content aware fill and content aware cloning. The steps involved are very simple. Here is the original photograph. As you can see it was done in HDR and it's one of my favorite storm chasing photos since it captures a storm chasing truck along with one heck of a storm rolling in over the city of Tulsa.
We will be using the content aware fill option to remove the stop lights from the top right of the image. To do this simply select the object to remove using the selection tool of your choice. In my case I used the lasso tool. For content aware fill to work properly it's best to select some surrounding pixels around the area to replace. This gives Photoshop CS5 a better model to work with when computing the fill values. This also allows us to be a little sloppy which makes things easier on us.
Next go to the edit menu and select Fill or press Shift/Option-F5 for the shortcut. This brings up the fill options dialog box. Make sure content aware is selected, blending normal and opacity is set to 100%.
This will give us a result similar to the following. If the fill pattern isn't to your liking you can undo and repeat the process as often as you wish. As you can see the content aware fill did a pretty amazing job at erasing the stop lights from the scene but there are a couple of artifacts that we need to get rid of. Namely the duplicated power lines.
Now we can utilize the content aware healing ability of Photoshop by selecting the spot healing brush. You want to brush in an area wider than the spot we are replacing so set the brush size accordingly.
The spot healing brush does an equally impressive job of cleaning up the loose power lines in the photo. You may have to go over the area several passes to get rid of all the unsightly lines but it's still a lot easier than the old way of doing things. The areas where the line needs to continue will still need to be touched up using the clone tool but overall our job is much simpler with CS5's content aware features.
As you can see the final image has been drastically altered with a minimal amount of work. The content aware editing features represent a giant leap forward in photo editing and I think you will find the feature makes this version of Photoshop irresistible!
Article by Emmett Lollis Jr. November 29th 2010
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