Photoshop Makes Something Out of Nothing - NYTimes.com:

Photoshop Makes Something Out of Nothing - NYTimes.com:
May 25, 2011


By ROY FURCHGOTT

"The newest version of Adobe Photoshop, CS5, has some pretty tricky tools, and at least one that the developers at Adobe didn’t know about. But it’s a surprise that can come in handy.

The new tool is called content aware fill. What it does is to allow you to remove an unwanted element from a photo and to automatically fill the spot with a background that matches the rest of the photo..."

"...The tool won’t work on just any image and repeating patterns are best. “It doesn’t work well on a street for instance, where there is no pattern,” Mr. Hughes said, especially when the area you are trying to fix is vast. “Let’s say you gave it a large area to fill, say 30 percent, and you’ve got a flagpole here and a car there, it’s really hard for it.”

An attempt to use it on a missing corner of a vintage photo didn’t work, but it might have been a problem of trying to repair too large an area, said Mr. Hughes. “The trick is to carve it up in small pieces.” So just repair smaller pieces at time rather than an entire missing section all at once.

While it’s fine for removing a piece of trash from a lawn, or a lens flare, be careful about overusing content aware fill and calling the result a photo. You can sail past the point of fixing a photo and straight to pure illustration."