Content-Aware magic

- [Narrator] Okay, if you recall earlier we built a panorama in Lightroom, and that's the sort of thing that I needed to go to Photoshop for in the past. I love the workflow in Lightroom. It's really, really fast. Sometimes you get a panorama, and you're missing pieces of the image. So this one, it actually looks really nice, but let's take a closer look, and we see that we're actually, we're missing about, I don't know, 20% of the image here by constraining our crop. So, if we turn that off, and this is so great. It's entirely nondestructive.

It's a RAW image, so I can get to all the missing content here. If we come in here, we see that there's quite a bit missing. Nothing I can do with that in Lightroom, but if I hit Command E and send that over to Photoshop I can fix it up over there really easily. Photoshop launches, the image comes in. I'm going to flatten this, because what I'm going to do is going to be destructive. I'm going to grab the magic wand tool, which is the tool that I don't use real often, but it's great when you have a really dominant, clear color that you want to select.

In this case it's the white around the border, and I'm just going to click on the white areas of the image, Shift click to continue adding, and what's really important about the content aware tools is that you give them room to look around. So, if I come down to select, modify, expand. Let's give this, yeah, six pixels is great. It just needs room to look around. What it's going to do is it's going to fill in the white areas based upon what it knows about the image.

So now with that selected, we're going to come down to fill, and by default it's on content aware fill. I'm going to click OK. And Photoshop does such a nice job of filling that in and blending it. You would never know that those pixels were missing. Hit Command W, and we're going to save that right back alongside the original. Head back here in Lightroom. So, here's the image before Photoshop, and here it is after.

Great example of what you can do with that. Now, you have a lot of tools like that in Photoshop. Photoshop is great at that sort of thing. It can do all sorts of really powerful retouching. So, another example of that would be something like this, where I could hand that over to Photoshop, and we could pretty quickly and easily get rid of a lot of the stuff in this image. Let me show you how this works. So, the healing tool is great for small objects, like this stick in the foreground.

Pull that out. It's even good for things like what you see in the sky here. What I would do with this is I'd give myself a really small brush. I'd click and then I would Shift click to remove that. I would click and Shift to hold the line. Click, Shift to hold the line. Then I'd come back in here, touch it up, like so.

You can see that you can quickly take that pretty far. If you have an area that looks a little funny, there's a couple different ways to fix it up. One would be to just clone in another area there. You can get rid of it pretty quickly. Now, there's some other tools that are really effective. Let's say I want to get rid of this area in the corner. I'm just going to select that. I come up here to fill, and use content aware fill to fill that in.

Now, it's a little trickier with something like this path. So, what I'm going to do with that is that I'm going to select the path, like so. And then I'm going to choose the patch tool, and I'm just going to say fill that with another area nearby, whatever that area might be. That'll work fine there. It's going to get me most of it. And then what I could do from there is come in here, patch in the others.

So it's all about knowing the right tool for the job, but we really quickly got rid of power lines, a path, a log, a stick in the middle of the road using the retouching tools in Photoshop. You can do some pretty amazing stuff. Again, when I'm done with that, I'm just going to go ahead and save that, and it'll be saved right back there in Lightroom next to the other one and we can really appreciate just how far we took that. Love doing that stuff in Photoshop. That's certainly what it does best.