The magic of Content-Aware fill, move, and scale

- [Instructor] Photoshop has a number of different tools to help you remove distracting elements, and they include the Content-Aware technology. They include Content-Aware Fill, Content-Aware Move, and Content-Aware Scale. We're going to start by using Content-Aware Fill to remove the lamp post and its shadow from this image. Now, I can use any tool to make my selection, so I have the Lasso tool selected, and I'll just drag a selection around the lamp as well as the shadow. When I'm finished, I'll choose Edit, and then Fill, and for Contents, I'll select Content-Aware.

I want to keep the option Color Adaptation checked on to help blend the colors around the selection. I'll click OK, and we can see that Photoshop has removed that lamp. I'll use Command + D in order to deselect. If you don't get the results that you're expecting, try running the Fill command again, because every time you run it, Photoshop changes the algorithm and will fill the contents using different areas from your image. Let's move to the next image of the birds. Here, I want to do two things.

I want to remove these two birds, and then I want to move this bird and replace those in this spot. First, I'll use the Lasso tool in order to select these two birds, and then use Edit, Fill, Content-Aware, then I'll click in the image area to deselect. I'll drag a selection around this bird, and then switch to the Content-Aware Move tool, position my cursor inside the selection, and drag to reposition it.

When I release the cursor, I get the bounding box enabling me to transform this before I drop it. I see the transformation handles, so that if I wanted to make this larger or smaller, I could click and drag, holding down the Shift key in order to constrain proportions. I'll tap the Return or Enter key to apply that transformation, and then I'll hide my edges using Command + H. If you're on the Mac, and it's the first time that you've hidden your edges, you'll have an option to either choose to hide Photoshop or hide extras.

Select Hide Extras, and that way Photoshop will hide your selection. With the selection still active, if you need to change the structure or the color settings, you can do so in order to blend the patched area or the moved area with the original background. For example, if I change the structure down to one, we can see that the actual content within there is changed a little bit. If I move the structure all the way up to seven, then it's going to try to mimic the original information as best as possible.

Here, I think I can get away with about five or four. With color, if I move the slider all the way down to zero, we can actually see that it doesn't blend in with the sky, so I'll return back to a setting of 10, then I'll show my edges using Command + H, and click outside of that area in order to deselect. Not only did we move and transform this bird, but you can see that Photoshop filled in the area that the bird originally came from.

Now, let's move to the next image where we can use Content-Aware Scale. In this example, I would prefer that the photograph were cropped to a one by one aspect ratio, or to a square, but typically, when I transform my images, that would distort the house. I'm going to change the background into a layer by clicking on the lock icon so that I can access the Edit menu, and then Content-Aware Scale. As I drag the left and the right side in, in order to change the aspect ratio and make this closer to a square, we can see that, although the house does get squished a little bit, it's not nearly the same as if I was using free transform.

In fact, if we want to see the difference between using the regular free transform versus the Content-Aware Scale, we can click on the amount and move it to the left, so if I were using free transform, this is what the house would look like, but using Content-Aware Scale, we can see that it's a biased algorithm. Photoshop is trying to scale down those areas that have lower frequencies, like the clouds in the background area, and leave areas like the roof and the building alone that have those higher frequencies.

And this works in both directions, so I don't just have to squish left and right. I could also bring down the top here. You can see that it's really scaling the clouds a lot more than the house or the foreground. If there's something in your image that you need to protect, we can save a selection and then load it. Let's cancel out of here by clicking on the cancel icon, and then I'll select my lasso by tapping the L key, and I'll draw a loose selection around the house, then I'll save that selection using the Select menu, Save Selection, I'll call it house, and click OK.

I'll deselect, return back to the Edit menu, choose Content-Aware Scale, and this time, when I move over the edge to scale my image, I'll tell it to protect the saved selection called house. Now, even when I really scale this down, we can see that Photoshop is preserving the house. It does start to look a little bit weird right here, so let's just stretch it out a bit more in order to get rid of that.

To apply the Content-Aware Scale, I'll click on the check mark, and as you can see, Photoshop has several different tools all using the Content-Aware technology that can help you get rid of distracting elements in your image.