Hi everyone, this is Anne for Graphic Design How To, and today we're going to talk about
Content Aware Fill.
This is a modified feature in Adobe Photoshop CC 2019.
So in order to be able to use it like I'm going to show in this video, you'll have to
have the most recent version, which only came out about a week ago in October 2018.
All right, so let's get started.
OK, so I've got this photo and I'd like to remove this person here.
What I'll do is I'll grab my Lasso tool, I'll roughly draw around him.
And then we'll go to Edit > Content Aware Fill.
Now Content Aware Fill does a pretty good job of just taking the surrounding elements
of the picture and kind of filling them in with him, but you can really fine tune this
and it's still not perfect, but I think it does a pretty great job.
So let's talk about what these tools over here do.
First off, we have the Sampling Brush Tool.
The area that Photoshop is pulling from to fill in this section is the green area that
you see here.
So for example, we probably don't want to sample these guys, or this girl, even though
it's not really pulling that information in right now...maybe a little bit here.
But we can go ahead and just delete them from the green area.
And that's what this first tool does.
It'll probably be set already to this 'minus' up here.
And so you can just start painting, you can also increase your brush size by holding CTRL
OPT and sliding to the right and left.
On a PC, that'd be CTRL and ALT, so I'm just going to delete her because I don't want to
sample the girl or this guy over here.
And I don't want to sample these guys either.
So anything that you don't want Photoshop to pick up to try to fill in that part of
the picture, just delete those parts from the green.
And if you decide you want part of it again, you can hold OPT and just redraw and it actually
will paint green on there for you.
But we don't.
So I'll just go ahead and get rid of those.
So that is what the Brush Sampler tool does.
If we move down one to the Lasso tool, this will allow us to modify or even completely
redraw our selection here.
So if we grab this, we have some options up here are the top.
This first one will let us completely redraw and have a new selection altogether, the second
one will add to the selection we have.
So if we use this, and we just want to get a little bit more, it'll add to it.
This one will subtract what we have.
So we can just subtract that little piece right back off of there.
And this one will intersect what we have.
You can also apply a different amount of feathering to that selection and choose whether it's
anti-aliased or not, and you can expand your selection or contract it by the amount of
pixels that you want.
The Hand tool is the same as it has always been.
It's just a way to move around your canvas.
You can also accomplish this with the spacebar, and then the Zoom tool, if you want to zoom
in and do some really fine tuning in there.
Other than the spacebar, the key commands don't really work, you can't hit Z to get
to your Zoom Tool.
Unfortunately, that's a little bit of a bummer, but I'm sure they'll fix that.
OK, so on your left, you have your original image, and on the right is a preview of what's
going to happen.
This section up here just shows how the sampling area is viewed.
You can turn it off and on, you can change the opacity of the green or change the color
of the green if you don't like it.
And then we get down here to the fill settings, which this is where things get a lot more
interesting.
Color adaptation will actually change the contrast and the brightness to adapt for a
better match on what they're pulling from.
This is good for filling areas that gradually change color or texture.
And the way I use this, I just kind of play around with it and see what it looks like.
That one doesn't look very good.
If we do None, it actually fills in pretty well.
For this photo, I think Content Aware Fill is just sort of a starting place.
And it does a pretty good job of getting us started.
But we'll have to go in and actually fix the image manually with the other tools in Photoshop.
Rotation adaptation is really great if your image has some rotation in it, and I'll pull
another image open here in a second, we'll look at that a little more.
And then the scale.
If that's checked, Photoshop will try to resize the part of the image that's changing for
a better match.
And this works really well for areas that have repeating patterns, kind of like this
one, and areas with perspective.
So also just kind of play around with this - check it and uncheck it - and see which
looks better.
Same with the mirror.
If this is a symmetrical image, it'll do a lot better job because it's actually going
to flip parts of the image, but you might not want that.
So it all depends on what you need your final product to look like.
Now the output settings.
You can either output to the current layer, which is is destructive.
So you will not be able to get the man back if you wanted him at some point later in the
future.
You can also add a new layer.
And what this does is takes that little bitty piece and puts it on a layer on top of the
other one.
And then finally, you can duplicate this entire layer and put that on the top.
So those are the three options there, I really recommend the bottom two, because it's not
a destructive way of working.
So we'll say New Layer, and OK.
And now you can see that we have a new layer with just that piece on it.
And if I hide it, there's the guy again.
So I really recommend doing it this way, because then you can still have him in case your boss
says, Hey, you remember that guy we took out of the picture.
We need him back now.
So let's go ahead and get another image here and I'll show you how well the Rotate tool
can work.
OK, so this time we're going to take these people in here I'm going to do the same thing.
Just I want them out of the picture.
So I'm going to just loosely draw around them.
And then go to Edit > Content Aware Fill.
And here's what's happening right off the bat.
I'm going to zoom out a little bit here.
First I'll grab the sampling brush, make it a little bit bigger.
And I'll get rid of all of this part up here.
Now it's not trying to pull in the banister anymore, just two steps.
And that looks a little better over here.
It's still kind of weird though.
Now we'll come over to the rotation adaptation.
And I'm going to try low first.
So it's trying to figure out where the rotation of this image is.
Medium.
It's getting kind of weird.
High.
I'm also going to add scale in here, only to get rid of this little piece here.
And also that piece...I'm gonna crop in just a little bit closer like this.
And like I mentioned before, it's not perfect, but it's a lot better than it used to be.
So you can really see that it's actually starting to use the rotation of the picture to try
to figure out how to redraw that without the people in it.
This time, we're going to duplicate the layer so you can see how that works.
I'll say OK, and now you can see we've got that entire background.
One with, one without, but this one includes the entire picture.
So we'd still have some work to do here.
But I think the Content Aware Fill has really helped things a lot.
Well, that's pretty much everything that you'll need to know about Content Aware Fill.
I've already been using this a ton and adopted into my workflow and I am absolutely loving
it.
So I hope you'll also adopt it as one of the things you use a lot in your own workflow.
Anyway, if you like this video, please click on the Like button and I will see you next
week with another graphic design tutorial.
Thank you!!!