There
is no question, learning Adobe’s Photoshop can be an intimidating endeavor.
The program is so imposing and powerful that many are frightened away
before even trying. It took me several books and courses before I felt
that I could begin to use at a small part of this amazing tool. The fact
is that Photoshop is so deep that, I suspect that no one person can fully
understand it all.
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Chesterfield Donkey |
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My
approach has always been to decide what I wanted to do for my images, and then
discover how to use the parts of Photoshop which would help accomplish that
goal. I didn’t worry about everything that Photoshop can do, just those
things that I can use.
Of
course, when starting, there are a few basic tools that are important to
understand. Importing images, layers, selections and the basic image
controls are essential, but what about all that other stuff. You can go a
long way without having to worry about, HDR, panoramic merging, and split
toning, but it’s nice to know that all these tools are there just waiting for
you to explore – when needed.
One
of these tools, which is fairly new, is Content
Aware Fill. Like many of the new tools, Content Aware Fill (CAF) just
provides an easier way to do something that you could do before. It has
always been possible to use the Cloning Tool to fill unwanted areas of an image
with pixels taken from other parts of the image, or even from another image.
This can be arduous, as you try to find areas that blend seamlessly with
the underlying content and texture. The cloning brush is still an
essential tool, but given the right situation, Content Aware Fill can use the
amazing computational power of Photoshop to automate a large portion of the
job.
Content Aware Fill
In
the Edit drop-down menu, Photoshop provides a list of options to fill an area
of an image. A selection can be filled with the current foreground or
background color, a pattern or any color you choose. This is also where
the content aware tool is found. After creating a selection around an
unwanted area of the image (eg my face), Content Aware Fill will attempt to
fill the area with pixels from around the selection. It works to blend
the fill with the surroundings. It doesn’t always work perfectly, but
often the results are almost magical. Typically, the filled area can
benefit from a bit of touching up with the Cloning Brush or the Healing Brush. I
thought of this as I was working on a picture of a pasture lane in
Chesterfield.
Pasture Lane
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The Leaning Lane |
Recently,
I was visiting a friend’s farm down a backroad in Chesterfield New Hampshire.
In addition to becoming reacquainted with their semi-friendly donkey, I
got a nice shot looking up the pasture lane which reminded me of the power of
the Content Aware Tool. The picture had
all the essentials, beautiful light, a nice fence and road all leading to the border
tree and even a distant tractor. Great! But when I got home, I realized
that all of my focus stacked images were significantly rotated clockwise. I
could just hear the donkey laughing, but, hey, this is digital, all I had to do
was rotate the image back to plumb. A 5.5 deg counter-clockwise rotation
brought everything back to normal, but the process left me with four triangular
areas of vacant space at each of the corners.
Curing the Triangular Transparencies
My
choices were simple, I could either crop out the areas of transparency, use
cloning to fill the spaces or do some combination of the two. I wanted to
keep most of the full image, so cloning was the obvious solution. All of
this could be achieved with careful use of the cloning brush, but it was the
perfect situation to start with Content Aware Fill.
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Fill Menu |
I
started working on a fresh pixel layer to preserve the original layer and then by
selected one of the spaces. On this picture, selection was easy to do. On these geometric shapes, I find that the Polygonal
Lasso Tool works well. It is generally good to expand the selection
slightly into the surrounding pixels. I typically use “Modify” “Expand”
adding about 5 to 15 Pixels, depending on the size of the selection.
I then pulled up the Content Aware Fill option under the Edit drop-down
menu.
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Filled Triangle |
The
Content Aware Tool has a few options.
“Color Adaptation” should be checked to improve the color blending of
the patch. Since I was filling an area
of transparency, the most important thing in this case is to leave the
“Preserve Transparency” box unchecked.
Otherwise none of the area will be filled. I hit “Ok” and waited for the magic.
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Duplicate Fence Post |
In this case the results were generally quite good requiring only a
little cloning touch-ups, but the CAF tool works randomly each time and, if you
don’t like the results you can always try again.
As you review the
results of the fill, it is important to look for areas where surrounding detail
has been noticeably copied into the patch. This can be seen in the upper
left where a fence pole was clearly duplicated. A little cloning easily
removed the obvious defect, but sometime the duplications can be more subtle. A careful examination is always a good idea.
Madame Sherri’s Hat
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Madame Sherri at the Ball 1920s |
Like
most of Photoshop’s new “magic” tools CAF is not quite as magic as it is
suggested in Adobe’s press releases.
CAF does not work in all situations and almost always requires some
amount of clean-up to reach the best result.
An example of this can be seen in my article about repairing antique photographs. The absent area of curtain
was first filled with CAF, but the folds did not align with the rest of the
material. With the cloning brush I was
able to smooth out the lines to make a more even match. We can see that Madame Sherri really knew her hats!
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Content Aware Fill - Poor Alignment |
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CAF and Cloned Touch-up |
Parrish Shoes
That’s
it. One of the confusing things about Photoshop is that there is almost
always more than one way to achieve the same result. The challenge is to choose the right tool or
tools for the situation. As you use the
CAF tool you will begin to recognize situations where it will work well and
other where the surrounding detail may get blended uncomfortably with the
result. In these situations, “Content Aware Patch” can provide a bit more
control over the sampling area. But that is a subject for another article
and, of course, you can always go back to the good old Cloning Brush.
Jeffrey
Newcomer
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