Success & Saving Time with Content Aware Fill

So last month I wrote up a bit of a review of the limitations I have come across with Adobe’s new content aware feature found within Photoshop CS5. And no, in one month my views haven’t necessarily changed. The problems I had found in trying to fill complex areas still plague me, however I have certainly found some new ways to take advantage of content aware fill that have sped up my daily work flow.  I had mentioned I would give you guys a post talking about where this new feature excelled so here we are, talking about CS5 one more time.

This month I had a quick afternoon shoot for Bad Boy Brands, an ultimate fighting clothing company. The shoot was basic but involved a lot of catalog shots against a white seamless. During post production I came across two instances where the new CS5 feature didn’t necessarily save my butt, however it did save me some time.

The first time I found content aware fill (lets call it CAF from now on to save some ink) useful came about when editing the hundreds of catalog shots we took. We shot fighters Xande Ribeiro and Demian Maia in just about every item of clothing the company had available. What we didn’t have available was a lot of room. Without a ton of space to work with we couldn’t unroll the seamless as far as I would normally like so we are left with a strip of cement visible in a number of the shots.

Obviously you can still get rid of this without the use of CAF but in this instance it saved me a ton of time considering how many images I needed to prep for the company. Instead of masking in or cloning out the cement I was happily surprised when I realized I was able to simply lasso the area, hit delete, and watch it disappear. Not only does it disappear but it leaves you with a natural continuation of the gradient found on the seamless.

The second part of the shoot involved producing some images that we could use to composite for a print ad we will be producing. The basic idea involved a few lifestyle shots and a few action shots. The action shots would later be pieced together into a sequence. The problem we ran into was that gyms are loaded with logos and the company obviously wants to only show their own logos in their ad.  Once again this is something completely possible without CAF but with the number of images I was working with it saved a lot of time. Have a peek below to see how just a few lasso selections and a couple pokes at the delete key rendered the background logo-less.

Notice all the logos in the background

Logos selected with regular lasso.

And finally.. no logos. Obviously this can be accomplished hundreds of ways but a quick lasso and delete saves a lot of time.

Ok, two months in a row spent on content aware fill… I think we’ve had enough. I can definitely reiterate that this feature will not be your new magical tool changing you into the photographer you have always hoped to become, but it will save you some precious time in the right circumstances. Questions?