New Technology More Options

I took this photo I think a year ago but I hadnt finished editing it. The problem was that there were so many distracting elements. For example; there were cars parked on the road, signs in various places, a distracting car that I had composed into the right side of the frame and general crap on the ground. Last year when I looked at this photo I was really enthusiastic to get to editing. The past hour went by and I started to get frustrated. Why? The elements that were so distracting just would not properly budge unless I really gave an extreme effort and time to remove it. I suppose I was a little impatient but isnt every photographer shooting digital these days, Haha! After a while of feeling content with my image so far I saved it and left it at that. Just today I actually looked at it again and realised that this photo would look great with more tweaks, such as removing the other distracting elements that I hadnt removed previously, which was pretty much everything that I was too lazy and impatient to remove.

The thing is, now I have Adobe Photoshop CS5! And it is amazing! One awesome feature that I have found to be so useful is the Content Aware Fill. It has sped up the process in my retouching workflow when it comes to most image situations I have encountered so far. Usually I would use the clone stamp mixed with some heal brush to do this job and it was tedious! But thats the way it has always been done so I stuck with it. Content Aware Fill seems to reduce the amount of strokes or steps to remove something from your image, its a simple use of the lasso and then right clicking and choosing fill and then selecting Content Aware Fill. That easy and most of the work is done!

My critique on Content Aware Fill is that it does achieve a good result most of the time. However, if you think about it, its exactly like the heal brush but you are able to slect the area. But isnt this also like the patch tool? Actually, you are able to use the patch tool and it contains the Content Aware feature so its just another way to use it. Either way, we all win in the features department.

Thanks to this feautre and my willingness to try it out, I opened up this image and was surprised at how fast it was to remove all the distracting elements. It took me five minutes to remove the crap and a few more to add extra details back into the image. Just like the heal tool, it can remove/cover up most distracting elements but there's the possibility of artifacts along the edges but those things are easy to clean up.

Overall, I was very happy with my finally finished result. It looks cleaner and places focus on what matters, the car :) The Content Aware Fill feature is a great new addition to the software, although it will not entirely replace my previous photoshop practices, it will work alongside to increase my productivity and provide me with convenience which really is what I am looking for. Giving me more time to take photos and less time having to edit them. Always a good thing in my opinion.