Since Adobe Photoshop CS5, we've had a tool called Content-Aware. It's been described as magical and a life-saver but what exactly is it and how can we best use it? In this tutorial I'll take you through three and a half of the most advantageous uses of this revolutionary tool.
Imperfection Removal Using the Spot Healing Brush Tool
We'll start with the easiest use of Content-Aware. If you ever have dirt on your lens, want to remove small imperfections from portraits or even zap a distracting bird from a sky then this is the tool for you. It will, in most cases, remove unwanted aspects from a photo quickly and smoothly.
You can see several spots of dirt here. Select the Spot Healing Brush Tool:
Make sure Content-Aware is selected and then take a brush slightly larger than your speck of dirt and click over it. The tool will assess the small area around the imperfection to fill over your speck seamlessly. Told you it was easy!
Using Content-Aware Fill
This has a variety of uses in itself but they all have the same premise so when I go through this example with you here, you can apply it to your own particular needs. This is a common one though, wonky horizon lines.
Straighten That Horizon
Sadly, I didn't tilt the horizon here for the purposes of example: I actually took the picture like this. If you're like me and this kind of shot creeps in now and again then this tool will be particularly useful for you. First, use the Ruler tool to draw a horizontal line along something you know should be straight, so in my case, the sea.
Go to Image > Image Rotation > Arbitrary
It will automatically fill in the angle based on the line you drew before. Hit OK.
Fill in the Blanks
You'll be left with a straight picture and some excess white bits left over from your rotation. Select those using the Magic Wand tool and with Add to Selection clicked, select the white parts like so:
You're going to want a slight overlap when this fills so that your edges aren't obvious, so the next step is to go to Select > Modify > Expand
It will then ask you to select how many pixels by. This depends on how large your photo is (I went for 20px) so try a number, see how it looks and if the overlap looks too great or too small, just repeat the last step until it looks right.
Now go to Edit > Fill
Have Content-Aware in 'use' and hit OK.
Content-Aware will do its thing and fill in your gaps with pixels based on the rest of your photo. Now this process is great but like all things, it's not perfect.
Anomalies
I deliberately chose a picture that would have some easy to fill bits (the sky – it's relatively plain) and some harder parts (the rocks – where we have more detail). You can see where I've highlighted above, that there are a few anomalies.
They aren't easily visible at a small resolution but you can see them if you zoom in as I have on the examples. These things are very easily fixed with the Clone Stamp tool and even the Spot-Healing Brush as mentioned above. It's just to make you aware that there may be some tidying up or blending to do once you've used 'fill'.
The Patch Tool
This is our 'half' in case you were wondering. The Patch Tool (see below) works on the same premise as the fill technique but with a slightly different method, so I'll go over that briefly.
Select Patch Tool and use it to draw around something you want rid of. Then drag it to a section of pixels that you'd like it to use to base its 'fill' on. So here I have a pesky puffin bottom in my shot
I selected the tool as described above and drew around the puffin I'd like to remove. Clicking somewhere inside the marching-ant lines, hold your left mouse button and drag the selection to somewhere you'd like it to 'fill' from – so in my case, the plain sky.
You can see that it hasn't just replaced it with the grey of the sky, it's also created a reasonable edge of the rock that doesn't look out of place. Again, this tool may require some blending depending how 'busy' the area you're using it is.
Content-Aware Move Tool
This tool lets you select part of your image and move it elsewhere, whilst automatically filling in the background for you so you're not left with a 'hole'.
Use the Lasso to select the person or thing you want to move; be quite rough with this, don't crop in too tightly:
Now choose the Content-Aware Move Tool:
At the top you have Mode which can be set to Move or Extend. Extend will do what it says and extend your subject. This is useful for repeating patterns like grass or a wall for example but not what we want to use here. So make sure Move is selected and choose your adaptation. This is how your selection will adapt to its new background.Very Loose/Loose would distort my subject terribly here but Very Strict will mean the lines on the grass will be pronounced. For that reason I'm going to go for Medium.
Left click and hold on your subject and move them to where you want them to be. Note –you can change the adaptation after your move, to see how it differs.
If you find you lose any details then you may have cropped a little tight, just go back to your selection and use shift to drag your line further away from the parts of your subject that you're losing.
I've moved my subject left and you can see where I've circled that there are some anomalies but on the whole, it looks pretty good. I can tidy up those bits using the spot healing tool, clone-stamp tool and even the content-aware fill
I've done a very quick tidy-up job here just to show you but the tool is quite remarkable in its blending.
Conclusion
Content-Aware has, in my opinion anyway, changed the way we do a lot of our editing. Where before we might have spent hours labouring with the various cloning and blending tools, now there is almost a 'one-click' fix. It may need a little tidying up afterwards but it's pretty amazing in its analysis of the image and its blending from that interpretation. It may not be magic, but the bods at Adobe clearly have access to a little fairy dust, and you'll find it sprinkled liberally over the Content-Aware features of Photoshop.
