Adobe Blows Your Mind With Content-Aware Fill

And you thought content-aware resizing of images was amazing? Prepare to have your mind blown by a new feature coming to Adobe Photoshop in future versions: content-aware fill.

A demo video from Adobe (embedded below) has photographers, digital artists and tech enthusiasts dropping their jaws, but in case you don’t feel like watching it, here’s what it does. Basically the content-aware fill lets you select an area that you’d like to touch-up or an object you’d like to remove from an image and with a few clicks, it disappears. Seems magical right? That’s exactly why people are freaking out.

In the video example below, the user is able to remove a tree from a picture by simply drawing a rough selection around it and selecting content-aware fill. It also allows him to remove trash and tee markers from the grass with relative quickness. In a more extreme example, the demonstater takes a picture of a road in a desert and makes the road disappear.

The thing about this is, yeah, it could be done before, with painstaking effort going inch by inch across the screen. This does all that hard work for you (or most of it at least). A popular tool in Photoshop for removing things like zits or blemishes is the clone stamp or the patch tool. With content-aware fill, there is no painting involved; you just select the area you want to remove and it does the rest.

The thing missing from the demo for me is how they are managing to do this. Obviously their algorithms are getting smart enough to be able to tell what an area looks like and to recreate images that fit with it. I just wonder what level of sampling vs. creation is being used. Anyway, check out the video below to have your mind blown by the near future of digital photo editing.