Digital Processing Issues and Fixes: Content Aware Fill: Plants and other Non-geometric Features.

The content Aware feature of Photoshop is a useful tool for deleting portions of a photograph quickly and having the background rebuilt seamlessly. It works well were the b.g. is a brick wall or a wooden fence, even receding lines, as the geometry engine in Photoshop recognizes the patterns with few errors. In landscapes, however, it makes less wise choices of what to copy and does not respect the notion of a plant as a form to be preserved. So one can get obviously weird results with the incomplete side of a cut off bush being built up out of grass taken from somewhere else in the picture. It's not smart enough to cole the plant, flip it horizontally, randomly alter the branching and so repair the plant. It seems to know nothing about plants.



Here's an example. I happened to notice a tree laden with ripe lemons, a nice autumn sight in Southern California. Only having my 50mm Ricoh GXR, I grabbed two overlapping shots. Later I stitched these in Autopano Giga. As you can see, to keep the entire tree, we have to deal with 3 areas with no information, A, B and C.

We can select all 3 areas and then have Photoshop "FILL" these areas, (Edit-Fill-Content Aware). Look especially carefully at area "B" on the right side, where a leafy shrub needs to be rebuilt.



As you can see the program samples green areas, but not necessarily those appropriate for the area. In the case of area B, a mush of grass is used to complete the cut off shrub! It cannot differentiate between a grass and a leafy plant! So what to do? I thought the best thing is to limit choices. So I made a selection of adjacent content that has the appropriate patterns only and then did content aware fill for just that isolated portion on a separate layer. Then I assembled the entire image.





Now the error in the corner post is repaired by simple cloning, (as content aware fill failed, it made a nice pattern instead by mirroring the shaded areas pretty, but wrong.) Then the picture was optimized to my taste.



Of course, I'm going to return with my Canon 5DII and the 24mm T-SE, to get the picture in one shot. Still, in the process of repairing this picture, I learned that one can use content aware fill for more complex content, but one needs to create cutouts first with just the texture one needs adjacent to the place to be filled in. If you has discovered other interesting ways of leveraging the content-aware fill tool, this, please share!

Asher