Photoshop’s Content-Aware Fill technology is an excellent way to remove objects in an image and fix areas that are distracting to the viewer. In this image I want to remove the stones from the water.
- Tap L key to select Lasso tool.
- I’ll drag a loose selection around that stones as shown below.
- From the Edit menu, I’ll choose Content Aware-Fill.
- On the left, we can see our original, and on the right, we have a preview of what it would look like after it’s been fixed.
- Green area right here is the area that Photoshop is going to be using as the source information in order to fill the area that we have selected.
- If we want to add to or subtract from that selection, we can use the Brush tool. By default it’s set to minus, so that would subtract an area. Every time we paint with this brush, Photoshop will then recalculate the preview area.
- There are different sampling area options, auto, regular, and custom. Auto works really well for the majority of instances.
- There are additional options for color and rotation adaptation. So if I thought the colors weren’t matching, I could change this, either limiting the colors more or telling Photoshop it can make even additional changes to the color in order to create a good blend.
- We can choose to sample all layers, so if I was working over an area that I had retouched on a separate layer.
- Once we are done with retouching, click on Apply. Then we can repeat the above steps until the whole image is as we desire.
- Last step is to output the edit. Now I’m going to select Output To to New Layer by clicking okay.
- Content-Aware Fill will create a new layer, when you tell it to output to a new layer.
Assisted Fill
Sometimes it can be very helpful to kind of assist Content-Aware Fill. In this image, these leaves are going right over this rock area. So if I want to remove this branch, I could help Content-Aware Fill by using something like the Clone Stamp tool and creating sort of a border in between the river area and the rock area.
- Select the clone stamp tool, and hold down the Alt key on Window to sample point.
- With this tool selected, just create kind of a difference between rock and leaves.
- So I’m just creating a little bit of separation between what is rock and what is a leaf.
- I can tap the L key to get the Lasso tool, and then I’ll just make a loose selection here
- Now i will follow the same steps as discussed above.
