Photoshop CS5's Content Aware Fill

One of my favorite new capabilities in Photoshop CS5 is the Content Aware Fill. When I saw the pre-release demonstration of this tool, at first my jaw dropped in admiration, then I cheered. And then I calculated the soonest I could possibly get my grubby little hands on the new Photoshop. Gone are the days of tediously using the stamp tool to clone away unwanted and distracting objects in photos!

When you use the content aware fill, Photoshop is going to analyze your image and create a background fill of what it thinks the image would look like if that unwanted object was never there.

Here's my original image. Just an old snapshot.

Not bad, but what if the big pole on the right could go away? And the oil spots on the concrete, and also the street lights in the background? I think it would look better. (Did you even notice the oil spots until I mentioned them?)

So here we go. (in Photoshop CS5) The first step is to never work on your original photo. Either save a copy as a new file, or work on a new layer (Control/Command + J for layer duplication!)

Once you have your working photo, use a lasso tool, or your favorite selection tool to loosely select the object you want to have removed. Don't make the selection right on the edge of your object! In the example below, I used the polygonal lasso tool because my selection shape was going to be roughly rectangular.

Then, if you are working on your Background layer, you can just hit delete and a Fill menu comes up. But if you are working on any other layer in your image, you need to go to Edit < Fill. A menu comes up.

I really prefer using the keyboard shortcut for going there. It is Shift + F5.
So here is the Fill menu.

If your drop down menu doesn't say "Content Aware" (like the one above), switch it, so it looks like the image below.

Once you have this selected, click ok.

The computer will chew on this for a little bit. My selection isn't large, so it only took a couple of seconds. The larger the area selected, the longer this processing time takes. Let's see what it did…

I left the selection on, so you could see the area. It's not perfect. So you can either touch it up by hand, or you could reselect the areas that need improving, and then run the Content Aware Fill again, just like we did the first time. Here's my touched up version:

You'd never have known it was there. Hurray! Okay, so what about the oil spots? Same thing. Loosely select the areas you want gone, bring up the fill menu (remember it's Shift F5, or hit delete if you are on the Background layer) and the magical Content Aware Tool will fill it in.

And the pesky lamp posts in the background? Gone.

Even the one by the guy's head can be mostly taken out with Content Aware Fill.

Just to show the whole truth, here's what Photoshop will do if you select something too complicated:

Oops! With practice, you'll learn what will fill well, and what will end up looking like this.

Okay, after all of that touch up, here's what our final image looks like:

Your eye is no longer drawn away from the people in the image to look over at the pole. And even though the oil spots weren't terribly distracting, you have to agree the image looks better without them.

The Content Aware Fill can also be used in smallish places with the Spot Healing Brush tool. First, select that tool in Photoshop, second go to the top bar that shows that tool's options, and select the Content Aware radial button:

Then you can "paint" with that tool, and the fill will be healed using the new Content Aware capabilities.

Fun, right? Quite useful, too. With this new feature in CS5 Photoshop, you can quickly touch up photos, eliminating much of the need for tedious manual cloning in. I wouldn't want to do touch ups with out it now.