In the current Photoshop CS5, Adobe introduced a technology called content-aware fill that could automatically fill in a hole left when a portion of the image was excised. In the upcoming CS6, the company will take that idea much farther.
In the company's fourth Photoshop CS6 preview, Photoshop Senior Product Manager Bryan O'Neil Hughes showed two new ways to use the tool.
The existing tool fills in holes by making its best guess where to find filler material elsewhere in the image. O'Neil Hughes said that with the new version, photographers will be able to pick the source of filler on their own.
"What I want is the ability to drive this and tell it what to put where," he said. "People have been asking for this for a while with the patch tool, and that's just what we've given them."
More dramatic is the new content-aware move tool. He used it to center a coin-operated telescope in the image. It had only been crudely selected, but Photoshop did a creditable job figuring out how to remove the original data and reconstruct the new background. (It did have a blurred background, though, which probably made the task easier.)
Some folks fret that photo manipulation tools mean you can't believe what you see in digital photos. In this case, it seems to me that content-aware move doesn't advance what experts can do as much as it makes the process faster, easier, and available to a much larger audience.
Photoshop sin is in the eye of the beholder, though. Photojournalism tends to hold such modifications in disdain, but you can bet that just about every photo you see in an ad has been fiddled with at least a little. And who would want to squelch the photo manipulation imagination of Erik Johansson?
Here's Adobe's video: