Adobe is making some big improvements to the Content-Aware Fill tool in Photoshop. In a sneak peek of an update that’s “coming soon,” Photoshop Product Manager Meredith Stotzner shows how an upcoming version of the tool will make it easier to get realistic results from this already-powerful fill tool.
Content-Aware Fill is already a powerful feature that works well about… 50% of the time. But it’s about to get a little bit more intelligent. Coming soon, when you access Content-Aware Fill from the Edit menu—rather than using the automatic version available under the “Fill” options—you’ll see that Adobe added a section called “Sampling Area Options” with two new options: Auto and Custom.
The current version of Content-Aware Fill uses the option titled “Rectangular,” making a box around the selection, which you can then mask as needed to ensure it’s sampling the right area for your fill. This manual process works, but it can be extremely tedious.
The Auto option uses Adobe’s Sensei AI to do the work for you by “analyz[ing] the image content and determin[ing] which locations best match the pixels immediately bordering the selection.” The difference in results between “Rectangular” Content-Aware Fill and “Auto” Content-Aware Fill are night and day.
Custom, meanwhile, starts with a blank slate, giving you full control of the sampling area. You select only the pixels you want used to sample for the Fill, instead of modifying a selection made automatically by Photoshop.
Check out the full sneak peek video up top to see the improved Content-Aware Tool in action. Adobe hasn’t revealed when exactly the feature will launch except to say it’s “coming soon,” but based on the video’s opening title, it looks like we’ll see these improvements fully baked into Photoshop before the end of the year.
