Do you remember what it was like to remove unwanted things from photos in Photoshop before they developed the ‘Content Aware’ feature?For those veterans who have been around for a while, you know how time-consuming it was to make these unwanted objects in photos disappear when the best tool in the box was the healing brush. It took days, extreme patience and a whole lot of skill for minor edits. If it was not done with perfect precision, the edits would be noticeable, and your time and effort wasted, leaving you a little beyond frustrated.
Then Adobe developed the content aware feature and suddenly, what might have taken a week now only took a few clicks of a mouse. This feature alone was enough motivation to trade in your Photoshop CS4 for CS5 (yes, this was back in the day). However, this feature, amazing as it is, has been far from perfect.
The problem with the current version of Photoshop CC’s Content-Aware Fill tool is that the process of removing a selected area from an image and replacing it based on its surrounding pixels, is done automatically. This gives us very little control over how the area is replaced so when it insists on filling the area with content we don’t want, we find ourselves once again having to to resort to alternative, time-consuming and tricky methods to achieve the desired results.
However, being the ever-improvising software company that they are, Adobe has been working on this in the background and have managed to take it to a whole new level.. They’ve cranked up their disappearing act by adding awesome new features to the Content-Aware Fill tool, giving you more control and making it easier to blend the filled parts seamlessly with the rest of your image.
This version makes it possible to specify the part of the image you want to use for Content-Aware Fill, giving you the control needed to get the results you want. The path to get to this tool is easier too. Simply Click the Edit tab and select Content-Aware Fill from the dropdown menu. The new easy-to-use interactive workspace features among others, flexible Output options, Rotation Adaption for changing the angle of source pixels, Scale for perspective and Mirroring. Plus, there’s a live preview so you can monitor your edits as you make them.
In short, the new version of Photoshop Content-Aware Fill comes with the promise of a more controlled, simple, time-saving user experience. But don’t simply take our word for it. Watch this sneak-peak video, released by Adobe on 10 September 2018, to see just how nifty this new improved Content-Aware Fill is. After all, seeing is believing, and once you’ve seen its capabilities, you’re going to be just as excited about its arrival as as we are.