The Magic of Generative Fill

 

"Distraction" Removal Strasbourg France

My intention in this article is to discuss the marvelous new Photoshop tool, Generative Fill, but first I feel I need to explain and apologize for my prolonged absence (until a week ago) from publications in this blog.

I am a little surprised and a lot ashamed that it has been just over two years since my last post to my digital photography blog. I understand some, but not all, of the reasons for my absence.  I have always said that I do the blog primarily for my own fulfillment, a way to force myself to consider the challenges of digital photography in a more formal way.  I hope that my discussions have been helpful to others, although I must observe that my ghosting has not led to an uproar of disappointment from my “fans”.

 

The reasons for my absence are many.  Certainly, I must blame, as everyone does, the pandemic, although you might expect that all that free time should have led to more output.  Over the years I always did my best writing while settled at a table in my favorite coffee house and it just hasn’t been the same staring at the monitor isolated in my studio.  The good news is that I started this blog back at a table in the expanded Brewbakers. I did expect that my retirement would have led to more free time to devote to writing but there have been various competing priorities. 

Courthouse Butte Sedona Arizona

Several trips, including to Iceland, Ireland, Arizona and up the Rhine River have added volumes of images requiring editing, and of course the documentation of our two grandchildren have contributed great piles of pixels.  All excuses aside, I must acknowledge that a major reason for my silence must be ascribed to my own profound laziness.  There is something about having all this free time that encourages sloth. My pace is generally slower.  With all that free time tomorrow, it is always easy to put off what I should have done today. 

 

Enough excuses.  In the last two years the light has not changed and the beauty of New England remains remarkable.  What has changed are the tools that we have available to capture that beauty.  Successive updates to Adobe Lightroom have made it a more capable image editing tool while retaining its file management and organizational strengths.  It is possible to rely solely on Lightroom for your image management and processing, but Photoshop still is the gold standard and offers image editing capabilities that are still not present in Lightroom.  AI supported Generative Fill (GF) is one these powerful capabilities. I should add that GF is only available in the newer versions of Photoshop.  You won’t find it in Lightroom (yet).

 

Marshall Point Light

Added Gulls & Lobster Boat

 Generative Fill (GF) is not a perfect tool, but in many situations, it is almost magical.  Much of the attention given to Generative Fill is based on its ability to insert content into images.  By selecting a portion of an image GF can add almost anything that you may ask.  In my sunset picture of Marshal Point Light, I selected an area in the right upper sky and asked for three seagulls at sunset.  Each time you press the “Generate Button”, after a short period of “thinking”, the tool provides three choices. In this case one of the initial choices worked reasonably well.  Of course, I couldn’t stop there and added a lobster boat on the left.  GF gets these images from Adobe’s extensive image library, and it often    works quite well.  Of course, there is no roadblock to keep you from going too far.

Adde Elephant

 

In this case, an elephant parading among the rocks.  The power of GF to insert content is remarkable and, although it often has an artificial quality, it will certainly get better with further refinement. It is a lot of fun, but for me, I am uncomfortable manipulating the content of my images to this degree and I essentially never use this feature of GF

Generative fill has a couple of other tricks that I find quite useful.  First it can be used to expand the size of image backgrounds.  In this case my Bluebird was cropped too tight to his beak.  After expanding the canvas size to the right, I selected that area, pulled up Generative Fill and triggered it without putting anything in the text box.  The tool nicely sampled the surrounding area and generated a smooth consistent pattern for the background.  GF does a remarkable job expanding the edges of images whether it is sky, grass, water or whatever else you need.

Distraction Removal

Peggy's Cove Light Nova Scotia
Why Do They Watch Beside the Light

By far my most frequent use of Generative Fill is in the removal of distracting content from my images. I have always been compulsive about removing distraction to make my images simpler while directing attention to the key elements of the composition.  I have spent hours with my cloning tool trying to seamlessly eradicate stray rocks and branches peaking in from the edges of my images and most of all, trying to erase all the people who loiter about blocking the natural beauty.

People Removed the
Old Fashion Way

It’s not that I necessarily dislike people. They just don’t belong in my images. I contend that when we look at a beautiful view our minds tend to eliminate the crowds that inhabit the space. In a photograph those interlopers stand out and can’t be ignored.  My view is that removing these distractions brings the image back to the way we originally perceived it.  With that justification, I want to show how the use of Generative Fill has vastly increased the ease of removing distractions of all sorts.  I can illustrate this best by looking at a few images from my recent cruise up the Rhine River from Amsterdam to Switzerland.  On the trip I was frequently gifted with beautiful scenes of classic villages and ancient cathedrals.  Spectacular but also overrun with wandering groups of tourists.  It is easy to be frustrated by the gaggles, but I always had to remind myself that I was one of the tourists as well.

In the past I would use cloning to carefully remove a few of the most intrusive humans and other distractions, always balancing the severity of the distraction against the time required to meticulously scrub away the contamination. Often the decision was based on the complexity of the background that must be duplicated to fill in the space opened by the removal. In images that I found especially powerful, like the Peggy's Cove Light above, the time required for removal of distractions was more justified and I could spend hours cleaning things up to let the image shine through.

 

Crowded Old Town Strasbourg

Generative Fill has made this process much easier, reducing to a fraction the time required to clean up even the most cluttered image. 

 

Partial Crowd Selection

To use GF, you simply make a selection around the offending area (as above) and then open the Generative Fill tool in the “Edit” drop down menu in Photoshop. Click “Generate” without entering anything in the dialog box and wait for the results.  As always, GF will offer three choices based on the surrounding pixels.  Some can be bizarrely awful, but others are surprisingly good matches.  If you don’t like any of the choices, you can hit the “Generate” button again and get three more possibilities. 

Generative Fill of Selection

I’m not always happy with the first results, but more often my response is “WOW, how did it do that”.  Using GF, the process of cleaning an image is so fast and accurate that I find myself eliminating distractions that I would have previously let slide because they were either too minor or too complicated to work on.  

Further Removal of Distractions

Cologne Cathedral 

Sometimes GF seems to have problems getting things right. GF can dip into the Adobe Image Database to pull up crazy stuff to fill the gaps. You don’t want a poster board filled with gibberish replacing the person in front of the cathedral altar. In these situations, redrawing the selection may help.  

Crowded Bridge Strasbourg

For large or complicated areas breaking the target into a few smaller selections can help GF get a better result.   Here I had to do separate fills on the bridge and the reflection.  The important point is not that the GF results can go awry, it is how often it fills your selection with remarkably appropriate content.

Bridge is Clear

 

Spalen Gate Basel Switzerland

As I worked my way through my thousands of Rhine River images, I was amazed how many times I used Generative Fill to clean up my pictures. Amsterdam and the Rhineland are full of majestic landscapes, quaint villages and breathtaking cathedrals and Generative Fill allowed all these sites to shine past the distractions without adding frustration and hours to my editing time. Give it a try.  Once you get a feel for it, you’ll find GF is amazingly powerful and a lot of fun.

 

Also, check out my Gallery of images from Amsterdam and the Rhine 

 Jeff Newcomer
www.partridgebrookreflections.com