On September 27, 2010, I attended Kelby Training’s Photoshop Creativity Tour in Charlotte, NC. The 6-hour day covered various Photoshop topics such as Layers, Channels, Retouching, Compositing, Type, Special Effects, and 3D. The seminar was led by Bert Monroy, who is known for publishing several books including the first on the use of Photoshop (The Official Adobe Photoshop Handbook, coauthored with David Biedny). He also hosted his own TV show called PixelPerfect. This guy knew his stuff and apparently he knew about Photoshop before Adobe did! He does amazing work and is already testing out CS6. I was impressed by this Photoshop master, to say the least.
Bert Monroy provided a lecture and trained us on some new features that CS5 has to offer. One of the useful tools he covered is the brand new Content-Aware Fill. The best part is that this tool is extremely easy to use.
Take a look the photo below. This is one of the engagement photos I took for my friends, Kevin and Leigh (see my last post). In this photo, you’ll notice the orange construction tape hanging in between two trees in the back right – something that could be easily removed in Photoshop.
By traditional Photoshop approach, there are a combination of different tools to fix this – clone stamp tool, magic eraser, healing brush, and/or the smudge tool.
However, Adobe Photoshop CS5′s Content-Aware Fill makes this process much easier!
- Use the Regular Marquee Tool (or any selection tool) to select your area to fill.
- Go to Edit > Fill.
- Choose Content-Aware under Contents and press OK.
- Press CTRL+D or CMD+D to deselect and you’re done!
It’s that easy! However, note that it’s not always perfect. You may get some imperfections depending on the photo and what’s around the area to fill. However, this quick-and-easy fill can eliminate many unecessary steps that you have been performing in earlier versions of Photoshop!
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