You'd be hard-pressed to find a published image that hasn't spent some quality time in Adobe Photoshop. With new features such as Content-Aware Fill and Puppet Warp, Photoshop CS5 is more amazing -- and perhaps more bewildering -- than ever. That's where this full-color Missing Manual comes in. It covers Photoshop from a practical standpoint, with tips, tricks, and practical advice you can use every day to edit photos and create beautiful documents. Whether you're a beginner or an experienced pixel pusher ready to try advanced techniques, author and graphics pro Lesa Snider offers crystal-clear, jargon-free instructions to help you take advantage of these powerful tools -- not only how they work, but when you should use them. Describing the CS4 edition, bestselling Photoshop author Scott Kelby wrote, "Lesa did a great job on the book, and in my mind, it is the new Photoshop Bible." Learn your way around Photoshop's revamped workspace Get up to speed on essential features such as layers and channels Edit images by cropping, resizing, retouching, working with color, and more Create paintings and illustrations, work with text, and explore filters Prepare images for printing or the Web, and learn how to protect your images online Work smarter and faster by automating tasks and installing plug-ins Written with the clarity, humor, and objective scrutiny, Photoshop CS5: The Missing Manual is the friendly, thorough resource you need.

Using Content-Aware Fill in Photoshop CS5

By Lesa Snider

In Photoshop CS5, you have another option for filling selections called Content-Aware Fill. It works with the Fill command and the Spot Healing brush by comparing your selection or brushstroke to nearby pixels. Photoshop then fills the area so it blends seamlessly with the background. For example, you can follow these steps to break up a perfectly good boy band:

1. Open your image and duplicate the Background layer by pressing Ctrl+J. Since there’s no way to tell the Fill command to sample all layers (bummer!), it won’t work on an empty layer. 2. Use the selection tool of your choice to select the band member on the left. Because there’s a decent amount of contrast between the boy and the grassy meadow, the Magnetic Lasso tool does a great job. Grab it from the Tools panel by pressing Shift-L repeatedly until you see it appear. Mouse over to your image and click once to set a starting point, and then drag around the boy, clicking to add anchor points here and there. 3. Choose Edit > Fill and, from the Use pop-up menu, choose Content Aware. As soon as you press OK, Photoshop fills your selection with pixels from the surrounding area. To fix the remaining outline of the deleted bandmate, just switch back to the Spot Healing Brush by pressing K (in the Options bar, make sure Content Aware is turned on). With a quick brushstroke here and there, you can clean up the final image quite nicely and it won’t take hours like it did in previous versions of the program. Until you can actually wish an object out of a photo, this new tool ought to suit you just fine.