Adobe Photoshop CS6, the most recent version of Photoshop, has introduced many improvements that may appear minor on the surface but turn out to be startlingly awesome, especially to those who are as serious about their digital darkroom work as I am.
One tool that has experienced such a resurgence in usefulness is the Patch Tool now that it has had content-aware functionality added to it.
Back in version CS5, Adobe introduced the Content-Aware Fill and Content-Aware Healing Brush features. Content-aware filling and healing was and is a quantum leap forward for doing quicker and more realistic image clean up. As with any tool, there are still some limitations to content-aware fill and heal, however.
As long as the object being cleaned up is in the middle of a relatively uniform area of the images, such as sky, grass or foliage, then content-aware fill or content-aware healing are still often the best ways to get the job done.
However, in cases where the area being filled or healed is not uniform or is close to the edge of a something with different color, luminosity and/or texture you don’t have control over what the content-aware engine will sample from to do the filling or healing.
(click on image to enlarge) Using Content-Aware Fill to remove the distracting dark shape in the lower left corner.
(click on image to enlarge) The fill doesn't work because it sampled from an area just above it with the wrong pattern and color.
In cases such as this the Patch Tool with the newly added content-aware feature can be just the ticket because it allows you to select the exact area where the fill sample will be taken from.
How one uses the Patch Tool hasn’t changed. Simply select the Patch Tool from the Tool Box (found hidden under the Healing Brush Tool) and make sure the content-aware option is selected. Now draw a selection around the object your wish to remove. Once the selection is complete, click and drag the selection to an area of the image that best matches the area to be patched and let the content-aware algorithm do its thing. Because you control where the patch tool will be sampling from you are less likely to end up with areas of the patch that don’t match what’s around it.
(click on image to enlarge) Using the patch tool allows you to choose the location of the sample. Selecting the Content-Aware option enables seamless patching.
You can even adjust how the patch tool adapts the blended edge of the patch. The Strict Adaptation setting does very little in the way of blending the edges of the patch while the Loose Adaptation setting does a lot of blending and resampling to the edges. The degree of edge adaptation needed depends on the characteristics of the area being patched.
Before patch
After Content-Aware Patch.
Over the years Adobe has done an amazing job of adding big new features to Photoshop. At this point the most impressive changes tend to be very precise and highly refined upgrades to the way that previous tools and adjustments worked. Adding content-aware capability to the Patch tool is one of those updates that has taken the tool to a new level and gives us another powerful option in dealing with tricky image clean up.
Sean is an outdoor photographer, digital image developing enthusiast and photography educator based in Ashland, Oregon, where he resides with his wife and two sons. His previous career as a science teacher makes photography education a good fit. Sean teams up with fellow Photo Cascadia members leading workshops. He also teaches digital image developing classes, lectures and offers a series of Photoshop video tutorials.
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