Adobe made the lives of photographers exponentially easier when it introduced its Content-Aware Fill and Heal tool in Photoshop CS5 back in 2010. Two years later, it further simplified image processing with the introduction of Content-Aware Move in Photoshop CS6. Now, the company is pushing the boundaries yet again with its contextually-aware editing tool in the form of a new feature called Content-Aware Crop.
Illustrated in the above video demo, this new tool is capable of filling in missing visuals when you crop and rotate an image. Oftentimes, when cropping an image and accounting for rotation, you end up losing subject matter around the edge of the photograph. Now, Photoshop will be able to automatically account for the would-be whitespace and fill it in with computer-generated content taken from elsewhere in the image.
In the example shown, Photoshop is able to intelligently fill out the scene of a young boy in front of a lifeguard chair on the beach when it’s cropped to straighten out the horizon. Rather than leaving it as blank space, where you would previously have to clone-stamp the sand, sky, and water into the image, Content-Aware Crop automatically does the work with imperceivable differences between where the frame once ended and computer-generated sand and sky begins.
It should be noted that this won’t work on all photographs. But for images where the subject matter is in the center and the edges aren’t busy with details, it should work without much hassle.
No specific timeframe has been given for the new feature, but Adobe says its Creative Cloud subscribers will get it in the next major release of Photoshop CC.
