So last week Adobe released their latest suite if creative tools: Creative Suite 5.  After months of watching (and reading) sneak peeks I could not wait to try out one of the enhancements: Content Aware Fill.  The reader will remember that Adobe introduced Content Aware Scale in CS4.  Content Aware Scale allowed the Photoshop CS4 user to mainpulate a selection to alter "non important" pixels while maintaining the relative scaling of "important" pixels.  This in itself was a super cool feature.  You haven't seen ANYTHING yet.  Adobe has gone completely outside the box with their latest feature breakthrough in Content Aware Fill.  In a nutshell, Content Aware Fill allows a user to make a selection and then allow Photoshop CS5 to fill in the area based upon the pixels that surround the selection.

So lets look at a quick demo using a photograph wallpaper from wallpapers.qkype.com(I love this photo and you can find it at http://widescreen.qkype.com/wallpapers/nature_4/scenery_28/cold_scenery_widescreen_wallpaper_52405.jpg).  I have resized slightly for the purposes of this demo.

In the following image, I have decided that I don't like the look of the bottom left land mass, and want to remove it from the image.

Using any of the selection tools (I'm going to just do a rough selection with the lasso tool) I'm going to select the area of the photo that I want to manipulate.

Now I'm going to the Photoshop CS5 menu by selecting Edit, then Fill, then selecting Content Aware.  There are a couple modifications I could play with, but for now I'm just going to leave the defaults and click OK.

The resulting image is that the selection fills in based upon the surrounding pixels with complex content and complex details that would have taken MUCH longer before this feature. $nbsp;If the resulting image still needs a little more attention, you can repeat this process until you have something you are happy with. In this case, I am ok with the resulting photo.

If you have spent any time at all manipulating photographs, you will know just how trying and complicated it can be to achieve effects like these. In just a few simple steps, Adobe has made the process incredibly fast, and easy. By far, this is one of my favorite new features!