Technique Tuesday: Creating Beautiful Backgrounds With CS6 Content Aware Fill Tool

Hi Everybody,

After yesterday's blogging fiasco – after all my text turned into the Chinese or Japanese characters  – I was a little bummed. Nevertheless, I got things sorted out today and you can read  yesterday's post in its entirety below. And, since I had my Technique Tuesday post pretty much ready to go, you'll getting a double dose of DigitalProTalk today.

Creating Beautiful Backgrounds With CS6 Content Aware Fill Tool

In today's post I'm going to pick up where I left off last week. Last week I showed you how you  could use the “Content Aware Fill” tool in Photoshop CS6 to create a much more dramatic look to your sunset wedding photographs [link]. In this week's post, I'm also going to use the”Content Aware Fill” tool in this tutorial. But, in this week's tutorial I’ll use it a bit differently to obtain the final result I want.

I was recently doing a workshop in New Orleans, Louisiana and bad weather outside forced us to do all the photography inside the Westin Hotel. The Westin Hotel provided some terrific backgrounds for my workshop but I still wanted to get an outdoor feel in a few of the images. The second floor of the Westin offered some fairly large windows that I thought I could use to get the look I wanted in my photographs.

The problem was that the windows had a metal beam coming down the center and also had draperies hanging on the side of the window. The challenge was to remove the window’s center beam and the drapes as quickly and efficiently as I could. As I've said previously so many times, it's not so much about getting it right in the camera as opposed to fixing it efficiently in Photoshop. For me, it's always about getting it right as quickly as possible using hardware or software.  And, if my software tools allow me to fix an issue in only a few minutes then that will be the avenue I will take. Ask yourself the question: 10 minutes trying to get it right in the camera or 2 minutes to get it right in Photoshop? What’s your choice? I’ll take the two-minute shortcut every time.

Anyway, with the technique I’m showing you today, I think you'll be further impressed and see how to get even greater functionality with the”Content Aware Fill” tool.  Why not hit the PLAY button below and see just what I'm talking about.

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Hey gang, that's it for me today. Hope you enjoy today's tutorial and I hope you'll give it a try. Once you get the hang of it, it's really easy to use and you'll generally always get a terrific result.

Everybody have a great rest of the day and I'll see you soon.

-David