From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

730 Creative uses for Content-Aware Fill

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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730 Creative uses for Content-Aware Fill

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- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland, welcome to Deke's Techniques. I know, I look like a baby. A very old, horrifying baby. Speaking of which, I'm gonna show you a creative use for Content-Aware Fill inside Photoshop. Come to think of it, that's a bizarre intro, but you know what? This is a bizarre technique. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right here's the final version of the artwork as it appears inside Photoshop. And over here, we have the rings file open inside Illustrator. And again, if you want to learn how I created it, you can check out my course Illustrator CC One-on-One: Mastery. Now notice that my screen preview is pretty jagged, and we've got a couple of problems here. If things are looking a little wonky for you as well, then go up to the view menu and choose preview on CPU, and that should smooth things out nicely. And just in case you wanna learn how this is put together, go ahead and click on the rings with the black arrow tool in order to select them. And notice that the selection handles look nothing like the effect itself, and that's because this is the dynamic effect. And to see how it's put together, go to the window menu and choose the appearance command and then notice this guy right here, 3D Revolve. If you click on it then Illustrator will temporarily turn off the effects. So you can see it's a bunch of horizontal bars in the shape of a kind of hemisphere here. And you can also see the specific settings. And if you wanna see what that looks like, then you just turn on the preview checkbox and Illustrator will draw that effect on the fly. All right, I'm just gonna cancel out here, and I'm gonna go up to the edit menu and choose the copy command, or you can just press that keyboard shortcut, control c here on a PC or command c on a Mac. Next I'll switch back to Photoshop where I have open this image right here, which was probably captured by NASA in the first place, but I found a retouched version of it at the Dreamstime image library, about which you can learn more and get some great deals at dreamstime.com/deke.php. All right, I'm gonna get rid of that URL layer by pressing the backspace key or the delete key on a Mac, and then I would go up to the edit menu and choose the paste command or you could just press control v or command v on a Mac. Now normally I would recommend that you paste a piece of artwork from Illustrator into Photoshop as a smart object, that way you can always make additional modifications inside Illustrator if you like. But in my case I just went with pixels because I don't need to make any more modifications. After which I'll go ahead and click OK and you can see a preview of those rings. Now I went ahead and locked down the width and height values here, and I changed either one of them to right around 70%. But notice that the bottoms of the rings are a little bit bright. They're not absolutely black. And so I went ahead and made some additional modifications in advance. So for now I'm just gonna press the escape key a couple of times to escape out of the paste mode and then I will turn on those rasterized rings. All right, now I'll click on that object layer to select it. I wanna preserve this unharmed original here. So I'm gonna press control alt j or command option j on a Mac in order to jump a copy and name it as I do so. And I'll just go ahead and call this guy on white for reasons that will be evident in just a moment. All right now, Content-Aware-Fill is a static modification that generally speaking works from the contents of the active layer, which is why I need to fill the area around the rings with white. And I'm gonna do that by turning off the original object and then I'll go up to the edit menu and I'll choose the fill command, which has a keyboard shortcut of shift backspace or shift delete on the Mac. And I know some of you are gonna be like, no that's totally wrong. Because by default it says shift F5 here in the menu. But shift backspace or shift delete makes a lot more sense for reasons that I will explain in just a moment. Anyway, I'll go ahead and choose the command. And then, assuming that your background color is white as it is in my case, then you can change your contents to background color. If the background color is some other color then just go ahead and choose white from the bottom of this menu, and then change the blend mode from normal to behind, so that you're filling the transparent pixels in the layer with white and nothing more. And then make sure the opacity value is set to 100% and go ahead and click OK and you will end up with static white pixels behind your rings. All right, now I also wanna preserve a copy of this guy. So I'll once again press control alt j or command option j on a Mac, and I'll call this new layer spot heal and I'll click OK. All right now what you wanna do is switch to the spot healing brush which you can select from the healing tool fly-out menu. And this tool is set to work with content aware fill by default. And so to make sure that your default settings are intact, go ahead and right click on this little icon on the far left side of the options bar and choose reset tool and that way your type will be set to Content-Aware up here once again in the options bar. Now I'm gonna crank up the size of my brush by pressing the right bracket key a few times. And then I'll just go ahead and brush over the rings like so. And if you just brush in a fairly small area then you'll end up denting the rings. If you wanna create a hole then you need to brush a larger area like so, and then that will carve a hole into those rings and it'll be a nice ragged hole, which is gonna look pretty darn cool. Now you wanna avoid brushing out of the rings as you see me doing here, because if you do, you'll end up creating a break, which may be what you want. But it's not really to my liking so I'll press control z or command z on a Mac to undo that change. And, by the way, you can adjust your effect by painting over it some more, if you like. So notice each time I paint over this effect I'm ending up with a different result. All right, so that's one way to work. I'll go ahead and turn that layer off so that I can show you the other way, which is to select this on white layer once again and press control alt j or command option j on a Mac in order to create another copy of it. And I'm gonna call this guy just straight ahead content-aware. And I'll click OK, then I'll turn off the original because I want that guy to remain nice and safe. And then I would go up to the rectangular marquee tool click and hold and choose the elliptical marquee from that fly-out menu. And now I'll draw a pretty big selection. And I want it to be circular, so I'll press and hold the shift key as I drag, and I'll use the spacebar to move it around until it starts up there at that second ring, so really the first visible one, and it continues down here to the second-to-last ring without going outside the object. And just as a precaution, I've gone ahead and saved my selection as an alpha channel so you have a chance of getting the same results. And to get to that channel, go up to the Windows menu and choose the channels command, which'll bring up the channels panel. Then drop down to this circle item and press the control key or the command key on the Mac and click on it and that will load up the selection outline that I used. Then you wanna return to the edit menu and once again choose fill, but I'm gonna take advantage of that keyboard shortcut. Once again, it is shift backspace here on a PC or shift delete on a Mac, which makes a lot more sense than shift F5, because after all, there's a bunch of other related keyboard shortcuts that involve backspace or delete. For example, if you press alt backspace here on a PC or option delete on a Mac, you fill the selection with a foreground color, if you press control backspace or command delete on a Mac, you fill the selection with the background color. So again, shift delete brings up this dialog box. I'm gonna switch to Content-Aware. I'm gonna change the mode to normal so that we're filling the opaque pixels and then you can experiment with color adaptation. So I'll go ahead and turn it on for starters, and then I'll click OK in order to fill that selection with a kind of hole. And it actually ends up looking really cool. So you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna deselect the image. I'll switch back to the layers panel, and I'll turn this guy off for a moment, turn on white on which is the unmodified version of the rings. This is why it's so useful to have this guy in your pocket. And then I'll press control alt j or command option j on a Mac to create another copy and I'll call this guy CA off. And the CA, by the way, stands for color adaptation. At which point I'll click OK. Then I'll turn off that original so I don't mess it up. I'll return to the channels panel and I will control or command click on this circle channel in order to load it up as a selection outline and I'll press shift backspace or shift delete on a Mac to bring back the fill dialog box. I'll turn off color adaptation and I'll click OK so that we can see yet a different result. And the interesting thing about this is every time you apply Content-Aware Fill, and I have to say, I didn't know this before, every time you get a different result. So check this out. I'll go ahead and turn on the original content aware, and you can see there's that effect. And then with the color adaptation checkbox off I got this effect instead. But watch what happens if I go ahead and press control d or command d on a Mac, I have to do that every time if I wanna jump a copy of this layer right here. I'll go ahead and turn it on and select it once again. Press control alt j or command option j. Call this guy 3rd time or something along those lines and click OK. Then I'll load that alpha channel this time using a keyboard shortcut of control alt 6 or command option 6 on a Mac. And the reason that works is because control 6 or command 6 just goes ahead and switches you over to that first alpha channel, assuming that you're working inside an RGB image. Anyway, I'll go ahead and switch back to the RGB composite and I'll switch over to the layers panel as well. I'll press shift backspace or shift delete on a Mac to revisit the fill dialog box and I'll just click OK. So I didn't change a single setting. And yet, I got a different effect. So check it out, this is what I got just a moment ago using the exact same settings, and this is the effect that I'm getting now. And so if you don't like that just press control z or command z on a Mac and try again. Press shift backspace or shift delete on a Mac. Don't change any of the settings, just go ahead and click OK and see what happens. Yet another different effect. Don't like that, just do it again. So I'll try yet another time. And the reason is I'm trying to get kind of a lump right here at this location, as you're seeing in the final version of the artwork. Notice that I ended up with this guy right here. And so each and every time you apply Content-Aware Fill you're going to get a different result, and so if you want to push things a little, rather than just reapplying the fill command, you can go ahead and deselect your artwork, switch back to the spot healing brush. And then I'll reduce the size of my cursor a little bit, and I'll just brush over this region. And I ended up deforming it inward. If I want to send it outward I need to paint a little bit more. But actually that's not working out this time around. So the darn tool is making a fool of me. But luckily I do have something I like in the form of this first content aware layer that I created at least this time around with the color adaptation checkbox turned on. And so whatever effect you end up getting, it's sure to be a lot easier than trying to draw something like this inside Photoshop in the first place. And so I'll just go ahead and press shift f in order to switch to the full screen mode, and I'll zoom on in as well. And those are a few creative uses for Content-Aware Fill here inside Photoshop. Wasn't that cool? And now I'm back. So uncool. If you're still interested next week, I'm gonna show you how to take that thing we just made and turn it into a portal to a far-away galaxy. Deke's Techniques, whether you like it or not, keep watching.

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