From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

More control with Content Aware

From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

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More control with Content Aware

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- [Instructor] Hello friends, this is Chris Orwig and welcome to another episode of Photo Tools weekly. In this weeks episode I want to highlight a new feature related to Content Aware Fill, that you may not be aware of, and it's a feature which can save you a ton of time when you want to remove unwanted objects in your photographs, like I want to do here. I want to remove a palm tree, a trash can, the picnic tables, and trash cans and what not over here as well. So this work flow all begins with choosing a selection tool, say like the lasso tool, and then you just make a generous selection around the object that you want to remove, and what I mean by generous is you want to go a little bit outside of the object. If you want to remove more than one thing just hold on the Shift key and then circle up something else, I'll get rid of this little sidewalk over there, and then I'll also get rid of the picnic tables over here as well. Alright, well once we have done all of that our next step is to go to the Edit pull down menu. Now we used to do this previously, before this feature, we would go here and just choose fill, but you'll notice there's a new menu item, Content Aware Fill, which will actually take us to a new work space. So first up is make a selection, second step Edit, Content Aware Fil, click on that menu item, and then inside of this workspace we'll see something really fascinating, and let me explain what we have here. We have a few tools, we have a preview of the sample area, we have a preview of the results. Now the results look pretty good, minus a few little problems, let me zoom in on this so you can see one of the problems, which is over here in the sky. So in the sky, what I try to do is say, "Hey, I want you to remove this palm tree", and Content Aware Fill looked around my image and said, "Well okay, I'll remove that", and it actually added another part of a palm tree on top of the old palm tree, so it didn't really work, and the reason that happened is it's sampling from this content, but what we can use is use this brush here on negative and, I'll make my brush a little bit smaller, and I'll just do that, just bring this down a bit, and I'm just going to tell Photoshop say, "Hey, you know what, when you're fixing that problem area just don't use this tree to fix that area", and so I'll go ahead and paint that away. Let go, you'll notice there'll be a little update here and then it will give us a new preview of how this will look, which it looks amazing. And this is one of the things that used to happen a lot with Content Aware Fill, is it would be reaching into other areas, which we didn't really want it to. Down here, this looks pretty good, a couple little things I might need to retouch away, but that's great. I notice I forgot to include this in the selection, no big deal, choose the same tool we used before, the lasso right, and say over here, "Hey you know what, while I'm here I also want to retouch away this little barbecue", do that, wait for it to update, and then now it's giving us the results over here. And the great thing about this is it just speeds up the workflow, I mean I did this whole tutorial with this image awhile back, doing all of this by hand, and I think it took 15 minutes, and now I finished it all you know, in a matter of seconds, so this really is one of those time savers. The other cool thing about this is you can choose to output this to a new layer, the current layer, I'm going to go ahead and do new layer and that way when I click Okay, what we'll see, what will happen really quickly, it's already rendered out, is all of the retouching that we've done is on this separate little layer, so here's all of my new content, and so this is all non-destructive, so if ever I decide to change my mind I can bring any of that back. And then of course whenever you use Content Aware Fill you may notice a few little issues, like right here, just create a new layer and then use some of your re-touching tools, like I could use the clone stamp tool for example, tap the S key and just do a little clone stamp work, because it looked like it, I don't know, created sort of a funny double horizon line there, so I'm just going to add that, but otherwise, I mean, you kind of kind of think to yourself, is this serious, did it really just do all of that for me? And like I said, when I first retouched this image it took me so much time, but you can see that this will open up whole new realms of possibility. So if you haven't ever experimented with this new feature, make sure you check it out. You find it under the Edit menu and it's called Content Aware Fill, we've had that before, we just haven't had this workspace, which now makes Content Aware Fill much more effective, or a much more effective and accessible tool. Alright, well I hope you enjoyed this one and I hope that you have a great rest of your day. Bye for now.

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