A content-aware move tool lets people move even complicated objects around on an image, with Photoshop handling the hard part.
Photoshop CS6's content-aware move is used here to move a woman in red.
(Screenshot by Stephen Shankland)
The woman to the upper left has been moved, and the pixels filled in where she was formerly placed.
(Screenshot by Stephen Shankland)
In the current Photoshop CS5, Adobe introduced a technology called content-aware fill that could automatically fill a hole left when a portion of the image is excised. In the upcoming CS6, the company will take that idea much farther.
In the company's fourth Photoshop CS6 preview, Photoshop senior product manager Bryan O'Neil Hughes showed two new ways to use the tool.
The existing tool fills in holes by making its best guess about where to find filler material elsewhere in the image. O'Neil Hughes said that with the new version, photographers will be able to pick the source of the filler on their own.
"What I want is the ability to drive this, and tell it what to put where," he said. "People have been asking for this for a while with the patch tool, and that's just what we've given them."
More dramatic is the new content-aware move tool. He used it to centre a coin-operated telescope in the image. It had only been crudely selected, but Photoshop did a creditable job of figuring out how to remove the original data and reconstruct the new background (it did have a blurred background, though, which probably made the task easier).
Some folks fret that photo-manipulation tools mean that you can't believe what you see in digital photos. In this case, it seems to us that the content-aware move tool doesn't advance what experts can do, so much as it makes the already established process faster, easier and available to a much larger audience.
A Photoshop sin is in the eye of the beholder, though. Photojournalism tends to hold such modifications in disdain, but you can bet that just about every photo you see in an ad has been fiddled with at least a little. And who would want to squelch the photo-manipulation imagination of Erik Johansson?
Here's Adobe's video:
O'Neil Hughes also repositioned a figure of a woman in red, who was standing in front of grass, a house, and the sky, so that she was in front of a different portion of the grass and house. The tool also offers an "extend" mode that he used to lengthen a roof.
Earlier Photoshop CS6 previews revealed a new graphics-chip boost for the liquify filter, a darker user interface, a background-save option, easier dotted- and dashed-line creation and new raw-image-processing controls.
The Creative Suite 6 software is due to arrive in the first half of 2012. Adobe is offering plenty of teasers to whet customers' appetites (and to justify the significant purchase, upgrade and subscription prices). Presumably, though, Adobe will save some scraps of news for the official announcement of the new image-editing software.
Via CNET
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