Adobe released this video last week about the new ‘content-aware’ fill that is coming to Photoshop CC later this year. This is absolutely crazy.
If you’ve ever used content aware fill, you have probably run across the occasional ‘oops, the program chose something it shouldn’t have’ moment…
Well, check out this video…
The new tool offers features previously unavailable.
Mirror, scale, rotation, creating the fill on a new layer…
Here are a couple of sample images they used…
While part of me watches this video and thinks about how much easier it will be to remove unwanted objects from a photo. There’s another part of me that feels we’ve become too dependent on Photoshop and other image manipulation software to create photos.
I’m torn.
Torn between thinking, “Oh, this can really help me save a shot that was ruined by something uncontrollable!” and “People are just going to use this further manipulate images to create something that is unreal.”
I have ABSOLUTELY nothing against the Photoshop artists who create amazing art with this software.
I do, however, see a lot of photographers using these methods of retouching and then presenting the images like they shot it that way.
I happen to know some photographers in the wedding industry who have disappointed couples because the photos that were delivered were not like the photos they saw on the photographer’s website. Well, that’s because the photographer didn’t spend an hour working on every photo to make it absolutely ‘perfect’.
I’ve also noticed a number of Instagram accounts, not by people claiming to be Photoshop artists, but rather ‘photographers’ where they’ve obviously manipulated images. For example, they add in a flock of fake birds to make an otherwise boring landscape shot seem more dramatic.
Uh, there are three identical bird silhouettes in a flock of a hundred birds? And they all appear to be the same distance from the camera at the same time.
They use these tools to mislead people into thinking they’re better photographers than they actually are…
And that can be problematic if someone decides to hire them for a commission or another paying job.
There also seem to be an entire generation of photographers who don’t really care about getting the image right IN THE CAMERA because they’ll just fix it later in Lightroom or Photoshop…but I rant…
That…is a conversation for another day.
What do you think of this new image editing technology coming from Adobe?? Tell me in the comments.
