The Magic of Content-Aware Fill

Content-Aware Fill is probably one of the best-kept secrets of Photoshop Elements, and it’s just incredibly amazing. It was a huge hit in the full version of Photoshop, but few people know that it exists in Elements, too. Anyway, as amazing as it is, it’s also incredibly simple to use, so don’t let the fact that it only took four pages here in the book to cover it throw you off. What makes the feature even more amazing is that you have to do so little—Elements does all the heavy lifting. Here are a couple of examples of ways to use it to remove distracting things you wish weren’t in the photo:

Step One:

Open a photo that has something distracting that you’d like to remove. In this case, we have a telephone wire leading into the church.

MATT KLOSKOWSKI

Step Two:

For starters, just to show you how magical this feature is, let’s see what life was like without it. Press J to get the Spot Healing Brush tool and click on the Proximity Match radio button in the Options Bar (instead of Content-Aware). Now, resize your brush so it’s significantly larger than the wire in this photo and start painting over the wire from the top of the photo all the way down to the church. When you’re done, look at the mess you’ve left. Not good, right? It may have removed the wire, but it left a blurry streak running through the photo.

Step Three:

Now, let’s see what Content-Aware will do. Normally, you’d think we’d have to spend some time cloning it, and even some extra time sampling, because part of the wire is over the sky and part of it is over the trees. But with Content-Aware Fill, we just let the tool do all the work. With the Spot Healing Brush tool still selected, click on the Content-Aware radio button in the Options Bar.

Step Four:

Paint with the tool over the wire all the way from the top to the edge of the church. Yep, the whole thing. Don’t worry about getting too close to the edge of the church roof, either. Just paint. When you release your mouse button, sit back, and prepare to be amazed. I know—it’s freaky. Look at how it replaced the sky and trees all in one brush stroke. The color looks spot on, and the texture in the trees looks like it’s a perfect match. This is the essence of being “content-aware” and being totally aware of what’s around it. The more I use it, the more it amazes me, but part of using this effectively is learning its weaknesses, and how to get around them when possible.

Step Five:

For example, while Content-Aware removed the wire almost flawlessly from this photo, there is one little spot that it didn’t leave perfect—right near the edge of the church roof, where it meets the sky. You can see it where I’ve zoomed in on it here.

Step Six:

If this ever happens, I try one of two things: First, I’ll zoom in real close and try painting over it again with the Spot Healing Brush (again, with Content-Aware turned on). Most of the time, that does the trick right away (and in this example it worked great). If it picks up areas you don’t want, just press Ctrl-Z (Mac: Command-Z) to Undo and try again. If that doesn’t work, then I simply resort to the Clone Stamp tool to get a little more precise in that one spot. But, I’d still try Content-Aware first. It may not take care of removing the distraction in one brush stroke, but it sure gets you about 90% of the way there in a fraction of the time that cloning and healing would.