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This article is from June 24, 2010, and is no longer current.

Create Content-Aware Patterns to Fill Out Photos

Russell Brown
Russell Brown

This tutorial is courtesy of the Russell Brown Show.
Photoshop CS5’s Content-Aware Fill feature intelligently fills in an area with texture that matches the surrounding pixels. While Content-Aware Fill is an amazing retouching tool that just about any Photoshop user can benefit from, its defaults are more successful on some photos than others. (Don’t have Photoshop CS5? Download the free trial.)
In this video tutorial, you’ll discover how to hide regions you don’t want to be part of the pattern so that Photoshop’s Content-Aware Fill patterns are as accurate as possible for every image.
For example, when I run Content-Aware Fill on the original photo in the usual way, the results aren’t realistic:

But when I use a special trick I’m about to teach you, the results are much better:

To learn the trick, click the image below. The video will launch in a separate window.

Are you reading this page on an iPhone or iPad? Click here for an iPhone/iPad-compatible version.
 

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Russell Brown
Russell Brown
RUSSELL BROWN is the Senior Creative Director at Adobe Systems, and an Emmy Award-winning instructor. He shares his delight in testing the creative limits of his tools, and his in-depth design knowledge and zany presentation style has won him a regular following among beginning, intermediate, and advanced users alike.
  • HawaiiBill says:
    June 24, 2010 at 9:10 pm

    Thank you Creative Pro for this introduction — for me, anyway — of Russell Brown great videos. And thank you Russell Brown for extremely valuable details on the use of Content Aware, the powerful new feature in Photoshop CS5. It’s great but difficult and Russell’s choice is wonderful to help fill in the hard to understand parts.

    Reply
  • Anonymous says:
    June 30, 2010 at 3:37 am

    I’ll grant that the “good match” version looks better than the “bad match” with its cloned arches. Still… this is really awful, even at tiny web thumbnail size. The bricks are distorted, mangled, and broken.

    Is the message that content-aware fill offers a faster way to make lousy images? I doubt that is the intended conclusion, but that’s all one sees here. Sorry, but this is not a demonstration that showcases any strength of content-aware fill.

    Reply
  • Anonymous says:
    January 4, 2011 at 2:13 pm

    I’m so glad to have upgraded to CS5, and be teaching classes for Photoshop Elements 9 – both updates are absolutely amazing & well worth the investment. Content aware is totally awesome! https://HartongDigitalMedia.com

    Reply
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