Printed from www.pcpro.co.uk
Posted on March 24th, 2010 by Mike Jennings
Photoshop CS5 demonstrates its stunning new party piece
The now-familiar release cycle of Adobe’s Creative Suite is signalled by two things: the hype and expectation of those who rely on Adobe’s applications and prices that, especially for UK users, seem to soar further into the stratosphere with every new version.
A single new feature, though, has awed the PC Pro office and suddenly made CS5 seem like fantastic value for money. It’s been dubbed the Content-Aware Fill, and has been shown off in a YouTube video narrated by Bryan O’Neil-Hughes, a product manager on the Photoshop team.
The dull, businesslike name hides a potentially revolutionary feature: if you’re not happy with an item in your picture, select it, delete it, and Photoshop will analyse the surrounding area and plug the gap as if it never existed.
It seems easy to use and incredibly proficient: O’Neil-Hughes used it to remove lens flare, turn patchy and litter-strewn grass into a perfectly manicured lawn. He quickly removed entire trees and let Photoshop stitch together the grass and sky that would take their place. It’s a testament to the new tool’s proficiency that we couldn’t tell that the image had been modified.
He didn’t stop there: a simple click removed a dusty track and replaced it with desert, and a panoramic image’s clumsy borders were filled out within seconds. Best of all, Photoshop handled these modifications without fuss and quickly delivered picture-perfect results.
Without this feature, making these edits could take hours – or, in more complicated cases, even days. The Content-Aware Fill, though, took just seconds – and has got us even more excited about the impending release of CS5. We’ll have a full review available when the software is released but, for now, this demo should be more than enough to whet your appetite.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
44 Responses to “ Photoshop CS5 demonstrates its stunning new party piece ”
Leave a Reply
Authors
- Barry Collins
- Chris Brennan
- Christine Horton
- Darien Graham-Smith
- Dave Stevenson
- Davey Winder
- David Bayon
- David Fearon
- Ewen Rankin
- Ian Devlin
- Jon Honeyball
- Jonathan Bray
- Kevin Partner
- Mike Jennings
- Nicole Kobie
- Sasha Muller
- Steve Cassidy
- Stewart Mitchell
- Stuart Turton
- Tim Danton
- Tom Arah
Categories
- About the bloggers
- Android App of the Week
- cloud computing
- Green
- Hardware
- How To
- iPhone App of the Week
- Just in
- Microsoft Office 2010
- Newsdesk
- Online business
- Random
- Rant
- Real World Computing
- Software
- View from the Labs
- Windows 7
- Windows 8
Archives
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
advertisement
March 24th, 2010 at 4:20 pm
If that works as advertised I am totally buying photoshop, it almost stops me wincing at the price tag.
March 24th, 2010 at 4:57 pm
Oh WOW! This is absolutely incredible. Party piece indeed.
March 24th, 2010 at 5:50 pm
The free, open source image editor “GIMP” has had a plugin to do this for 5 years: http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer
Using one of the examples from the video, the result: http://shishnet.org/ufufuf/panorama-synth.png
Photoshop’s interface is nicer though (paint-to-select + fill as a single stroke, and the option in the delete menu — the gimp plugin has “select area” and “context fill” as two separate actions)
March 24th, 2010 at 5:54 pm
Looks very nifty! However, it’ll have to go on the wish list for now.
March 24th, 2010 at 5:58 pm
Only one week till April Fool’s Day.
March 24th, 2010 at 6:37 pm
How does that even work?
March 24th, 2010 at 6:40 pm
pics or it didn’t happen.
March 24th, 2010 at 6:43 pm
‘dey took r jobs!!!’
March 24th, 2010 at 6:46 pm
Might be they’ve incorporated Inpaint for Photoshop, although Terox don’t seem to have it finished yet
March 24th, 2010 at 7:03 pm
There is a tool called Inpaint, which will do the same for 40 bucks
March 24th, 2010 at 7:07 pm
Wow, this is very cool. I remember seeing tech demos a long time ago with similar functionality. Glad to see it is finally making its way into consumer products. This looks like a killer feature and a reason to upgrade.
March 24th, 2010 at 7:09 pm
2nd guy from the right and bottom totally looks like bill hicks!
March 24th, 2010 at 7:10 pm
I’ve never been able to justify buying PS so I’ve gotten along without it. But this ….this would save me HOURS of work. I may have to remortgage just for this!
Oh, and Lightroom 3 is due out this summer. Decisions, decisions…
March 24th, 2010 at 7:35 pm
the guy’s a really smooth talker – as he tries to distract away from the progress bar grinding in the last panorama stitch image, he’s pushing it almost to what you hear on stupid infomercials on american tv. if he loses his job at adobe, he can become a car salesman in a jiffy.
March 24th, 2010 at 8:30 pm
What?
John are you serious? Don’t be a moron. He’s basically making an excuse as to why it takes as long as it does, which, is actually not that long.
And for that matter, it’s a good excuse.
This is a tech demo not a fucking sales pitch, don’t be a tool.
March 24th, 2010 at 9:13 pm
definately doing the upgrade! This will save so much time in so many instances.
March 24th, 2010 at 9:40 pm
Someday, technology like this will be used to convert old 4:3 aspect ratio films to 16:9. Just think, The Wizard of Oz or an old episode of Lucy in true hi-def widescreen.
March 24th, 2010 at 9:53 pm
nah!
Don’t be fooled! That is all photshopped! I can tell by the pixels.
March 24th, 2010 at 10:29 pm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inpainting
Decade+-old technology.
Lots of implementations already.
March 25th, 2010 at 12:29 am
A nifty feature, though a bit disturbing in the potential for abuse (as if PS wasn’t abused enough as it is.) Seeing the tools of Orwell’s world take shape is pretty creepy.
March 25th, 2010 at 3:40 am
PS laziness. I’m offended.
March 25th, 2010 at 8:27 am
Isn’t this a great idea ? Who was it who said “If you tell Lies often enough, people will believe you”. He would love this Application. Now we can all edit out Truth and convert it into Lies at the click of a few Adobe CS buttons. Sounds just the application for these presentation-led times where Image is valued far more than Content. Already, you can’t trust anything you see on a VDU or Monitor because it could have been manipulated before display. Soon, nothing will be credible, as presented, so I think I shall go back to my proper cameras and load up with honest film stock.
March 25th, 2010 at 9:18 am
Where can I buy this software? It would mean I could replace a whole team of people. And of course, you know what I really mean by ‘replace’.
Thanks,
Uncle Joe
March 25th, 2010 at 11:20 am
It’ll perform like crap for most people though when they put lousy images through it. All of the examples are high res and relatively well taken original shots. Also, there was no initial edit of that panorama, stitching one of those together can take a while too.
In short, they’ve not “Tuk Urr Jubs!”
March 25th, 2010 at 11:59 am
^^ These look like carefully selected images designed to match the tools capability. To be honest most of what’s on there for small spaces isn’t beyond the equally quick use of the Clone Stamp tool by an average Photoshop Operator.
The larger areas are a different matter, but most professionals would fill these kinds of issues by compositing multiple shots together. You’d really have to see the results in PSD format zoomed into about 800% to see the truth and if its going to cut the mustard for a poster campaign repro?
The funniest part is the start of the voice over.
“This IS the image the client has chosen for print…”
Thats the most realistic thing on there. Clients love to choose the shot which is perfect except for that “Huge powerline” or “Contrails in the sky”
On its own that not going to justify the upgrade price for me.
I’m just waiting for Adobe to implement something as awful as the Ribbon Menu just to “sell” the new look package to us all.
What’s the American upgrade release price going to be I wonder, ‘cos I certainly wont be paying UK prices.
March 25th, 2010 at 12:43 pm
Kindly screw Adobe and everything they stand for. I’m sick of it.
March 25th, 2010 at 1:19 pm
Been around for years as a GIMP plug-in: http://o3.tumblr.com/post/470608946/photoshops-caf-content-aware-fill-unbelievable
March 25th, 2010 at 1:50 pm
Did seem to take a lot of grinding along before completing the render. BIG QUESTION…what was the pc spec used for the demo? bet this was nothing actually affordable so no indication of actual processing time..
March 25th, 2010 at 3:54 pm
OMFG. Must have.
Though I must add, some of these fancy tools really detract from the “art” of Photoshop – the more automated these tasks are, the less talent is actually involved. Pros and cons, but I love what they’ve done.
I’d be interested in the spec of the system/PC/Mac they were using for this demonstration. It would give a good idea of what type of performance you can expect.
March 25th, 2010 at 4:42 pm
It was a Mac of some sort, so I guess Darkharedlord is probably right in thinking that it’s “nothing actually affordable”
March 25th, 2010 at 6:06 pm
Nice, but at this rate Photoshop will cost US$10K in about 4 years
March 26th, 2010 at 1:50 am
Neat enough, but a few(ok, quite a few) bug fixes, improved performance, and some customer service/support would be more of a selling point for me. TBF, I’m talking more Illustrator than PS.
March 26th, 2010 at 3:07 am
Ok, I got over my intial OMFG reaction. So, in some ways, this tool doesn’t impress so much. But the last example of extending the clouds into the missing picture area is almost too perfect to be believed. I wonder how much depends on exactly the right *type* of picture information at the start.
Regardless, it’s an obviously powerful and impressive tool. I AM concerned with how this will be mis/overused by average joes, as a previous poster expressed. As it is, too many people pull scams utilizing Pshop. But what can you do? We humans will never stop fooling or scamming each other!
And forward we go…!
March 26th, 2010 at 7:24 am
Nice demo of a very powerful tool. As Darekharedlord says, I’d like to know the power of the computer doing the render. But most of us won’t use the tools to lie about vast areas of sky or landscape, we’ll use it to remove the electricity pylon on the horizon or the fat git who refused to get out of the swimming pool when the shot was taken.
So I don’t care if a small render takes my machine a couple of minutes to complete if it means I can avoid half an hour’s time of pixel-by-pixel removal of dog turd burns on the lawn.
I’ll make some coffee instead.
March 26th, 2010 at 7:47 pm
Some even better examples of this awesome content-aware feature:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ScWu7pG7r0
So amazing!
March 27th, 2010 at 5:06 pm
great option to erase those unwanted memories
March 28th, 2010 at 5:17 am
Unlikely to be really use-able. Will likely need a lot more manual touch-up at 100 percent.
March 30th, 2010 at 2:58 pm
april fools?
April 1st, 2010 at 9:41 am
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and Photoshop CS5 Content-Aware filled pictures!
April 2nd, 2010 at 1:51 am
There’s a site (http://www.freekeygens.info) to get free CS5 keygens for those of us who will be torrenting it and scramble for a keygen.
April 8th, 2010 at 6:55 pm
perfect
April 24th, 2010 at 9:59 pm
Idiot comment at no. 40.
Get a life and take your spam somewhere else.
April 29th, 2010 at 12:22 pm
Posting genuine comments on high pr blogs will be appreciated more that regular comments. Genuine Comments posted once are not spammed.
May 19th, 2010 at 10:53 am
The GIMP, the free image editor, has had this ability since years: http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer
So stop praising Photoshop and be aware of the facts!