Like many I recently upgraded to Adobe’s CS5. I did it mostly for the better raw handling and improved HDR (which I still think kinda sucks). However, everyone seems to be talking about the content aware feature that reads different parts of the image and tries to fill in what you are removing with the right texture, pattern, etc… Though I haven’t had much use for it, the function seems to work very well with certain situations where there are a lot of pattern and texture. I’d never do this in normal real life, but here is a quick example of how powerful it can be.
Here is a zoomed in scene of the Heceta Head Lighthouse. I used the quick select tool to grab the buildings and people.
I then selected “fill” with content aware, and….. Ta-da!
Nothing else was done. While it’s not perfect you can see how amazing/dangerous this tool can be. Keeping photography “honest” may be even harder than before.
Ian