What Are The Chances? Playing With Adobe Photoshop CS5 Content Aware Fill

What are the chances of two guys, in pink shirts, holding laptops in a harness on their chests are the only two people in City Hall Park in Manhattan? Pretty slim. If you compare today’s image with the original (smaller) image you can see the power of Adobe Photoshop CS5s Content Aware Fill. If you compare them you’ll see that it’s almost a “can you spot the ten differences” type of puzzle. Okay, there’s only six or seven things, but you get the idea. Did Content Aware Fill magically remove everything ? No. But, without it I’d still be sitting there cloning stuff out. Things besides the people that have been removed include the trash can and a light post. Because it duplicated the vendor behind the third guy in the pink shirt I took the easy way out and changed the shirt color of the original vendor. One of the more interesting things happened while taking out the lamp post on the left side of the walkway. I was zoomed in a little and thought the post butted up against the left edge of the image. I used the Loop Tool to select the half of the lamp and post that was visible and turned the Content Aware Fill loose on it. It figured out that there was more to what “should be” cloned out and handled the situation without a hiccup. When I noticed that I should have been zoomed back out I had to say wow. Did CAF do the job 100%? No. To find out where I had to fall back on other techniques, hit the “read more”.
The biggest single piece that Content Aware Fill fell down on was the trashcan. But, (there’s always a but) once most of the bottom of the can was removed I used CAF on the top rim. It filled in the white flowers behind the top very believably.

Another small point was straightening up the curb on the left side of the walk.  Other than those CAF did just about all of the remaining work.  Fairly impressive if you ask me.
All in all Content Aware Fill did a pretty remarkable job with either taking the entire object/people out or gave a giant head start on getting the job done. Is the image ever going to be framed and hung on a wall? No, but it was fun to experiment with.