The Limitations of Adobe’s Content Aware Fill

Adobe CS5’s content aware fill feature obviously made a big splash when it was announced, but how much of the hype is just hype and how much will the feature really help your work flow?  Today we are going to examine one instance in which it would seem content aware fill would be every editors dream tool. A stitched panorama.

Anytime you stitch together a panorama you are going to be left with less than perfectly straight edges due to the distortion of your cameras lens. If you didn’t shoot the subject with enough room to spare above and below you are going to end up with a rather large project properly filling in the areas of sky or foreground that have been left out. If you have no clue what I am talking about have a look at the image below. This 360 degree panorama was stitched together from 12 different images using photoshop’s “photomerge” tool. The problem here is the images were shot too tight so after merging them it is impossible to crop away the leftover space without eliminating a few parts of the photo you would like to keep. (ie. tree tops or the roof of one building.

Here is where content aware fill could come in very handy. In the past you would have had to manually build a sky which is tougher to do than you would think. Matching the natural gradations of a blue sky is not an easy task if you want the image to look realistic.  With content aware fill you would hope you could just select the empty area and hit delete and the new tool would handle it all for you. Think again. Yes in some circumstances it will, however most of the time, like any other “automated tool”, it will just give you some sort of starting point and sometimes it wont even give you that. The next four images show exactly what happened if you were to just select your missing area and click delete. The new fill pane opens up allowing you to select content aware as your fill option.

Obviously our goal was not to create some random mountain tops in the sky… So we have hit our first problem. Content aware fill does not do a good job or much of any job when it comes to filling large areas, especially when there isn’t an existing pattern for it to copy. The only real work around for this issue is to attempt to do the same thing but select small areas of the sky at a time instead of trying to fill the entire missing area at once. Below is pretty much the best I was able to do with ONLY the content aware feature.

I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that at least for now this new feature will only enter my work flow on a limited basis. It does do a great job though at deleting small areas or objects. I’ll revisit this sometime soon so we can talk about the areas in which content aware does excel. Have a peek below to see how well a 1 step delete can erase pesky palm trees growing from a brides head.. This is a rather broad subject so let me know what you would be interested in seeing in regards to content aware fill or any other new cs5 features. Also stay tuned for a comparison of the ever popular Photomatix program and Adobe’s new HDR-Pro feature. Cheers!