From the course: Motion Control 3D: Bringing Your Photos to Life in Three Dimensions Using Photoshop and After Effects

Filling in the holes: Content-Aware Fill

From the course: Motion Control 3D: Bringing Your Photos to Life in Three Dimensions Using Photoshop and After Effects

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Filling in the holes: Content-Aware Fill

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- One of my favorite tools in Photoshop is the content-aware fill command. And depending upon your version of Photoshop, there might even be two variations of this tool available. You'll find it in the traditional fill dialogue, but there's also a dedicated content-aware fill command that's a bit more advanced. It's available both in the traditional Fill dialogue, which you'll locate under the Edit menu. And under the Edit menu itself, Content-Aware Fill. Let's go ahead and give this a try. I'm going to come over here and load a couple of these objects. I'll Command + click on this first one, and then hold down the Shift key, and Command + click on the second. If you're on a PC, that'll be Ctrl + Shift + click. Now, let's come down here to the forest layer and delete these. What I'd like to do is expand it a little bit. This is going to make it just a little bit bigger. Select, modify, expand. And I'll make it 10 pixels bigger so it grows the selection. Now, I could press the Delete key. With that same selection active, what I'll do now is expand it once more. This time just five pixels. That just creates a little bit of overlap. Now, we can invoke Edit, Content-Aware Fill. I strongly suggest if you have access to the second one to use it, but let me show you the basic one first. In this case, you could choose content-aware fill and click Okay. It'll analyze the surrounding pixels and come up with new ones. Not bad, not perfect. I see a little bit where we can clean that up, but let's undo for a second. Let's go ahead and expand that just a little bit more. Five more pixels to grow it. And I'll choose Edit, Fill using content-aware, but the color adaptation mode, which we'll try to blend the colors a bit better. That's definitely better. I can do a little touch up here with the clone stamp tool and fill that in, but it definitely jump started the process. Let's press undo twice, Command or Control + Z. Now, I'm going to use the better dedicated content-aware fill command. This helps you see where it's sampling. The green pixels are included in the selection. So if there's parts you don't want, maybe this area with the sky, you could just take that out from the selection. And where you let go it'll regenerate here. I'm going to make sure that this piece of artwork isn't included in my sample. And instead focus on the pixels that are nearer to the object itself. You can also switch to the plus key here and paint to add in pixels if you want those included in the sample. And with each, you'll see it generates. Now, what you can do is tweak this. I recommend that you adjust the size here so you get a larger preview so you really see what's happening. That's better. I see a small problem area here. Looks like in there there's a little bit of a blending. We'll touch that up. What I'm going to do now is look at the color adaptation. If I increase that, you see it samples the surrounding colors better and blends. Rotation is also possible, but this can sometimes be a bit tricky to calculate. But again, that actually helped. It dealt with the fact that the patterns were going left and right as the branches fell. That looks good. And you can output that onto the layer itself or make a whole new layer. I actually suggest the new layer option here and click Okay. Now, it's on its own layer and you can easily see it. This helps because what I can do is use the spot healing brush now just to touch this up. Go to that area where there's a little bad blend and brush over. Just look at some of the spots where it's needed and do a gentle touch up. That's definitely quite good. And by keeping it on its own layer, it's really easy to spot the transitions and tweak 'em as necessary. I suggest as you look at this, you tell it to sample all layers. And this will give you a good job of looking at the texture on both layers; the extracted layer and the new one, making it a little bit easier to blend. Let's toggle that on and off. That's definitely quite good. So by using two tools together, we get some great results. Once I'm happy, I can select both layers and choose Layer, Merge Layers, or press Command or Control + E. And let's just rename that forest again. There we go. It's definitely coming along quite nicely.

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