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Removing objects using content aware fill in Photoshop

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Course contents
SECTION: 8
CC Libraries 19:15

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Course info

107 lessons / 16 hours 21 projects Certificate of achievement

Overview

Course Overview

Hi there, my name is  Dan and I am an Adobe Certified Instructor for Photoshop  - this is the Advanced Photoshop course.

This course is not for people new to Photoshop. This is for people who already know the fundamentals. It is for people who have their own ways of doing things but believe there really is a better, faster way to work. 

We will start by learning the best selection techniques available. I promise, by the end of the first section what took you 30mins to mask will now take you 30 seconds. 

What am I going to get from this course?
  • 13+ Hours of content!
  • 10+ Interactive exercises
  • 68 downloadable resources
  • You'll learn the best selection and masking techniques
  • You'll know how to fix images that look 'hard to fix'
  • You'll master advanced levels and curves tricks, specifically with skin, adjusting and enhancing colors
  • You'll learn how to enlarge images without distortion and what to do when things go wrong
  • You'll know how to convincingly remove all kinds of objects from images
  • My favourite: You'll master the ability to distort, bend and reshape images
  • Lets look at how current trending styles are super easy to duplicate
  • You will become a type nerd. We'll use font pairing in Typekit. We'll also use Photoshop's ability to guess fonts
  • Your Artboards skill will be mastered
  • A master of retouching, you will become!
  • You'll learn to edit videos in Photoshop, who'd have thought?
  • We'll also create awesome cinemagraphs, AKA: Moving pictures!
  • You'll learn to master 3D in Photoshop!
  • You'll learn lots about professional, reusable mockups, techniques and shortcuts!

Here's some of the things we'll be doing in this course:
We will correct 'hard to fix' images and learn what to do with blurry images. We will master Advanced Levels & Curves tricks and will work specifically with skin, adjusting and enhancing colours. 

You will learn how to enlarge images without distorting them and also, what to do when things go wrong. 

We will learn how to convincingly remove all kinds of objects from images. My personal favourite section will show you how to distort, bend & reshape images.

We will look at how current trending visual styles are easily created, duotones, glitches and orange/teal colour grading.

We get 'type nerdy' and use font pairing in Typekit. We will use Photoshop to identify the fonts used in an image and learn how to work with hidden glyphs & ligatures as well as variable & open type fonts.

You will master artboards while you are learning how to make easily updatable multiple sized social media & ad banner graphics. 

There is a big section on advanced retouching techniques, advanced healing, advanced cloning & patching. 

You will learn how to edit videos in Photoshop. We will also animate static images creating parallax videos plus the very cool cinemagraphs sometimes called 'living pictures' - great for social media. 

You will learn to master 3D in photoshop. We will finish off the course with professional, reusable mockup techniques & shortcuts. 

This course has a strong focus on workflow. We use real world, practical projects and show you the professional techniques and shortcuts which will save you hours using Photoshop. Throughout the course I have many class exercises for you to use in order to practice your skills. 

Who am I? 
As well as being an Officially Certified Expert by Adobe, I’m photoshop guru and user with 18 years Photoshop experience. I make tutorial videos directly for Adobe and will again this year be presenting a seminar on  Photoshop at Adobe’s 20 thousand attendee strong Max Conference.  

If you can’t remember the last time you sat down and went through the updates in Photoshop, let this course be your one stop professional development and upgrade path.   

Even if you consider yourself a heavy user, I promise there will be things in here that will blow your Photoshop mind. Sign up now!

Course duration 13 hours 45 mins + your study.



Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Certificates

We’re awarding certificates for this course!

Check out the How to earn your certificate video for instructions on how to earn yours and click the available certificate levels below for more information.

Downloads & Exercise files

Transcript

Hi there, it is time for Content Aware Fill. My second most favorite tool in all of Photoshop, and it's a way to magic away rubbish, say goodbye to windmills, but I use it most for 'magic'ing up new sky that didn't exist before. We look at a couple of other handy ones, where there's text, it's fused to the background, goodbye. And those birds that we wrestled with in the last video. See you later, bye. It's quick, it's easy, let's learn how to do it now in Photoshop. 


To get started let's go to '05 Cropping', and open up 'Content Aware Fill 1', '2', '3', and '4'. I'm going to start at '1', we're going to remove this trash here. For the Content Aware Fill to work, you need to have a selection first. I'm just going to use the Lasso Tool. You can make any sort of selection, and you can be pretty rough with it. Look at this, rough all the way back to the beginning. And they hide this magical tool, my favorite tool in all of Photoshop. Content Aware Scale is my main one, this is a close second. 


So under 'Edit', 'Fill', this is where they hide this magical tool. It will probably default to Contents, Content Aware, so just make sure. Click 'OK', kick back, be amazed. Look at that. 'Deselect', gone. Just so you know - I'm going to undo - it's very similar, well it uses the same technology as your Spot Healing Brush. So there's times where you need to just do a selection, because it's quicker and easier, like in this case, or just grab the Spot Healing Brush. You can see, it's set to Content Aware, and you kind of just paint this out. It depends what is easier for you, but we get to the same position. Kind of randomly grab stuff in the background and pile it all in here. 


Let's jump to 'Content Aware Fill 2'. So I'm going to do a selection here again. I'm going to use my polygonal, I want to say polygonal. Not sure how to say that one. One with the straight lines. Clicking once, clicking once… So I want to get rid of these guys. These guys, these are Windmills, I know what they are. So once you've got your selection, 'Edit'. I use Content Aware Fill so much that I made a shortcut. If you're on a PC you'll have a good shortcut here. Just check what it is, I can't remember. On a Mac it's some random shortcut that on my computer opens up something like iTunes or something silly. So I went through and added my own shortcut by going to 'Keyboard Shortcuts' and making one. You can see I've got shortcuts for Content Aware Scale and Fill, because I use it so often. Command-Shift-C is my one. Click 'OK', and it goes and removes it. And sometimes, can you see? Undo, undo. It randomly grabbed that and stuck it here, and we know, let's put that there. 


Sometimes it does some strange things. To get round that I'm going to undo. If you just kind of like-- I'm going to minus just a little bit of selection out of this, maybe a bit of this. If you have a slightly different selection you'll get a slightly different fill. Click 'OK', hopefully we get rid of our tree, it's not a tree. I guess my main point is that it's-- you might have to do a second selection to get a different result. What I want to show you now though is a tool that is really closely associated. I find that in these courses I have two separate tools out so that, I guess you can see the definition between them, or the different use cases. But there are some tools that have very similar functionalities. They're hidden in different places. 


So the Spot Healing Brush, we just showed you there. We did that in the Essentials course, and we did it-- I showed you here just to remove the trash. Another really similar tool is hiding underneath the Spot Healing Brush. It's called the Patch Tool. We'll do a short explanation here. The Patch Tool has some other perks that we'll do in the retouching section. Later on in this course, I think it's section 10. But this tool here is exactly like the Content Aware, except it's a lot more, what I call intentional, I can click, hold, and drag this, and I can move it around. Instead of trying to grab more trees, like this guy, I can say, actually I want this part, and you can line it up perfect. You can see the sky doesn't work until I let go, and it magics it all in. 'Deselect', I've grabbed that specific bit. It's blended the sky okay, you can see there's this little bit. I guess I just want to show you that the Spot Healing Brush, Patch Tool, Content Aware Fill, all use a similar sort of technology. 


Content Aware Fill though is kind of more randomized. So it really depends on what you need to do. Now what I use it for most is generating kind of new backgrounds. In this case it's going to be sky, might be grass, waves, trees, great for nature. I want to put some text in the sky so I'm going to grab the 'Crop Tool'. Just drag it up. In the past, or in previous classes we used Content Aware Scale. That will probably work, but I want to show you another technique. So I've got a big empty area, grab my 'Marquee Tool'. I'm going to overlap it so make sure it overlaps, otherwise it ends up being a nice little line that joins. So overlapping, 'Edit', 'Content Aware Fill'. Fill it up. And, magic, I've got a new sky. Now I lift this one in here because there’s a little bit of banding. It's just like a perfect sky, so there's a little bit of obvious kind of banding going on. I'll show you how I get round that. 


If it's just one or two pieces you could use the Spot Healing Brush or the Blur Tool, which is there. There's a lot to do in this one. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to select a big chunk of it. Make sure it overlaps quite a bit, copy and paste it. And with that layer selected I'm going to go to, 'Filter', 'Blur', and good old 'Gaussian Blur'. How much? It's up to you. I just want to move it up until the banding, those little kind of rivers stop running. I'm going to click 'OK'. The cool thing about Gaussian Blur is, you can see there, it's added a bit of a fade. It's not going to work on every one, but I want to, I guess show you how I would fix it in this case. Often if it's clouds, it just does a perfect job. 


Let's look at the last one, Content Aware Fill 4, I do this as well. So I'm a Certified Instructor for Photoshop. So we get given marketing material that we get to use. Sometimes it comes through the official Adobe channels. It takes a long time at least. And I see all these cool graphics that they're using, and I want to use it straightaway. Let's say that I want to use this, I'm allowed to, just hasn't come through the official channel yet. So I want to remove this. It might be that you've got sent something from a client, they're like, "Hey, can you do this?" And you're like, the text is fused to it, you can see there's no layers going on. It's actually just jammed on to it. 


The problem is, if I grab the Eyedropper Tool, and pick some part of the blue, and then try and fill it, it's going to be very obvious, right? So I need that gradient, and that's where Content Aware Fill is magic. 'Content Aware Fill', click 'OK', goodbye, text. Content Aware Fill is awesome. Let's have a look-- we did this, remember this one, Content Aware Move? So we move these guys and reshape them. I want to show you this one because you don't have to do them one at a time. I'm going to switch to the other Lasso Tool. You can see, holding down the '+' key, and I'm just drawing a really rough guys around here. Let's say, instead of moving these guys, we want them out, you're like, "You'll ruin my shot, bird," you're out of here. So make lots of selections, Content Aware Fill, kick back, just does an amazing job. 


All right, that's it for Content Aware Fill. What an amazing tool! Super easy to use. It's just hidden under Edit and Fill. We know where it is now though. I'll see you in the next video.

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