Lessons

Lesson Info

Quick Retouching: Content Aware Move & Extend Tool

so those air kind of the main things that I do when I'm talking about retouching from a person perspective, Obviously the other kind of retouching is editing and removal of objects that are in the way. So you take a photograph and everything. This is great, but there's a twig over here, or there's something else that's it doesn't make the photograph look as nice as it possibly can. So that's when we want to talk about the other type of editing, which is changing the look or removal of everything. So in this case, I'm not gonna talk about it. Well, how should I say this? It's removal of a different kind. Otherwise, I'm not going to say, Oh, there's that one little thing in the corner that I want to remove. I could clone over that, but removal in the sense of when a situation This is one of what used to be before photo shop CS six, that kind of thing, where people would ask it and just kind of go, Oh, Lord, because they say that looks great. But can you just move us over a bit and just m...

oving us over a bit? Really meant Pick us off the background layer, move us and then sow cover us up. So we never looked like we were there in the first place, which meant, Ah, whole lot of cloning and a whole lot of undoing, and probably a whole lot of cursing because it was not easy. And then Photoshopped CS six brought out a tool which frankly, changed everything. It's really quite remarkable. And I have this philosophy over the years I developed. When I watch Adobe demonstrate something, I take it with a giant grain of salt because I'm figuring they probably invest a bit of time fighting the perfect photograph to make this function look really, really good. So I'm always like, Okay, if I'm gonna try this, I'm gonna try something really hard because I figure if they were standing in front of a stucco plain white wall, that be pretty easy. But this is like crazy brick stuff there, standing in front of and I want to move them over but cover up where they used to be, and I won't do it the old fashioned way. But let's just say if I'm lucky, would have taken me 25 minutes to try and make it look right here. I had a new layer and I use, uh, this tool, this one called the content Aware Move tool. So hint number one is gonna be good. It has the name content aware right in the name of the tool. So any time you see content aware, that's a good thing. The benefit of it is it has sample all layers is an option, which means I can do the result to a separate layer. Some of you may be remem remembering. Well, there's content aware fill Well, yes, The only problem with that, as you can't do that to a blank layer that has to be on a specific layer. This one is pretty amazing. I've tried this on many photographs, and I very rarely been completely disappointed. Usually it's pretty darn good, if not amazing. So I've made what you comptel is a fairly rough selection. I personally find it's better to make a rough selection rather trying to be incredibly accurate hours. Don't try to get just every edge of them, just roughly select around them. I've got a blank layer. I've got them here, and I say I think you should be further over to the right. So when I let go, it does game and talk fast. It does some calculation, moves them over and covers up where they used to be. Now it's not perfect. In fact, their faces look a little odd to me. And this is one of the few tools in Photoshop where changing something in the options bar you can do it after the fact, not just before. On most tools, you have toe set the options in the auction. Far used the tool. If it doesn't work, you have to undo it and start again. With this tool, you can, after the fact, say, Well, I'm going to see what happens if I change the structure to a higher number. Now the wording has changed a bit in the versions of Photo Shop, but the idea is you can change this number up or down while it's still kind of a life act. Go Okay, not that way, because it's just cut off like the top of his head completely. So if I go the other direction now, I don't know about you, but I look at that. I'm like I'm fairly happy with that, considering it took what was that 23 seconds. Now I could still do some further tweaking on top because sometimes you'll see a bit of a repetition of pattern so I might clone or something, or he'll on top of that. But, gosh, that's pretty amazing, considering what it's doing to go to be that fast. So my philosophy is very simple. Tried this first. If it doesn't work, try it again because it is fairly random. So if you try using, content aware, move into go Yikes, that didn't work, undo it and try it again. Don't redo it. Use the tool and move it again because each time it's random enough that that might make the difference or might say, I'm gonna be able to go in and fix it up. And now all this time a little bit different. And when you look at what it did, it's pretty amazing. I mean, he didn't just move them, it filled in randomly generated stones to try and make it look like it blended in. I mean, that's pretty remarkable to me that it actually has that ability to do that now is it always perfect? No, But is it better than you could do? You bet it. ISS. It's a great starting point and is definitely I might still have to end up going to my clone stamp or healing to kind of fix a few little areas. But I'd rather do that. Then be like clone stamping for the next hour. It really is is pretty amazing to see what it does. So that's the content we removed to. And I will tell you that that's this. There's a content aware move. Tool gets all the rave reviews, but hidden in one little menu is a pretty cool second cousin of that which is the content aware move, slash extend tool. And this is what that does. So I'm gonna just actually delete this layer and then zoom out a bit. Take my crop tool. Say I want to add this photograph to be a little wider, of course, when I make it wider, just while you can make the canvas water. But I can't just arbitrarily ADM or Stone for you because that doesn't happen. But that's where this tool comes into play. Add a new layer and then take the same tool, content, aware move tool. But there's an option here that says Extend. So now we'll come in here and I'll just kind of to fix that. Second, this uses regular selection techniques. So, in other words, here I went all close to his arms. I'll just use the option all key toe removed from it. I could, by the way, just use a regular selection tool and then switch to the content aware move Toe doesn't really matter. But I got sample all layers turned on. I've got extend. So what this does is instead of covering up where it used to be, it allows me to sort of pull this. I'd like some more over here and it instead of just copying and pasting it sort of blends things in. So if we were to look, you can still see a bit of a repeating pattern. And down here we have to do some cloning. But compared to the overall, just me copying the whole thing, it does a lot better job of kind of extending the pixels and blending them together. So a lot of people say, Oh, yeah, I've seen that content were moved to a, but they missed the fact that cause not a separate tool. But it's complete different function for this same tool by extending something so any time you're feeling like I need a bit mawr make this fertile wider. But it's such a come, complicated pattern. It would take a lot of work to really do that. It actually works pretty well. So that's a nice little added bonus. And again, any time it says the word content aware on there, then it's really useful. So sometimes when we're working, that's just the reality. The situation is the role of paper was that wide and just so well, So I want to fill in the rest of that with this yellow and my first thought might be content aware fill. The problem is, it's a smart object, and you can't do content aware fill on a smart object. So let me go through some of the possibilities. The 1st 1 would be enough to be my least favorite, but it would work would be to make a copy, and Rast arise that so it's no longer a smart object, and then make a selection this and then try content aware that look, OK, so it's perfect. You see, it just looks like there's nothing wrong with that at all. Content aware. Fill to the rescue And I kind of hope that would happen because I want to show you What do you do if that happens? Well, the first thing is I would tend to do it in a couple of pieces. First of all, is that a one giant one? Because the chances might be better. But if that keeps happening, here's a nice little trick you can do that will give yourself a better chance of success. And it's another Have to put our thinking cap on and say, How can I take advantage of the temporary ability of Photoshopped to do things? So I'm going to come in here and make a selection like this really quickly around her. This out of layer, mask its height, this for a second and then inverted. So that might seem like a really strange thing to do, because I have just removed her from the picture completely. You know, I have also removed from the picture completely, is now content aware, can't copy from her because it's not that she's not there anymore. So now I can go like this. Make that big selection. Click on here. Content aware. Click. OK, thinks about it per second. Perfect. Throw away the mask. So content aware the way it works is as I will arbitrarily pick surrounding pixels, and sometimes it picks the wrong one. So if you can say well, now you can't pick the wrong one because I've temporally hidden it. So I've used that a couple times, and I just I thought boy afterwards, that saved me so much time. Instead of me trying to figure out and do it 20 times and undo and redo and try something else. You just take it out of the equation. But make sure you do it the way where you're doing it temporarily by masking it. And that's one of those things where first time I was playing, as I thought, that's just seems like such a weird idea is I'm I would never mask her that way because I'm making a big hole in the middle of that. I thought, Well, that's why I'm doing it, though, is to say to content aware, you can't touch those picks anymore. cause you can't see him. So that's kind of a nice idea. I tend to like using the patch tool because content where filled with one drawback to it, which I wish would change that I don't know if ever will is. I like to do things on a separate layer and you can't content aware fill toe a separate layer. However, the patch tool has an option that came out in CS six, where one of the options for the pastoral is content aware. Ha and sample all layers. Ah ha. So now I can go and say I would like to First of all, try this area right here, and the patch tool has advance where is giving, like a life preview. So if you win, should I use this is a patch? No. So you can kind of see what am I going to get and let me pick an area that looks pretty good and it does that to the new layer. And then I would just and again, I find it easier to do this in pieces than trying to do it in one shot. And right now the colors are not matching very well because that's just sort of my step one. I was trying to get it covered up. Then I would go back in and do some more detail. Work with a solid color, content aware fill probably works just as well or better. Where the patch tool works brilliantly is something where there is a pattern like a brick wall. The content aware fill will not go. Let me line up those bricks. Pervert! Let's go pear, some bricks. Where is the patch tool? You can move in and go there now Those air matching really nicely and have it blend it and it's still the one tool that allows you do it on a separate layer. Okay, so both of those options are available. Content aware fill is a really wonderful option. Just remember, it has that one little minor drawback where you can't do it on separately. So you have to come up with some other plan like, Well, I'll duplicate the layer or something of that nature. Okay, let's go back to this. So here's on interesting little challenge, and I went looking for something that I wanted to find, something that was a little more of a challenge than kind of your everyday thing because by now I think many people have kind of got used to the idea of I'm not bad at cloning and I kind of got decent at the patch tool. There is a function. The photos will be brought out a number of years ago. When it first came out, people they were they were like saying Wait to you see this? It's so amazing And I think I look, I went if that ever happens to me. But it surprised a number of times, especially for you. Do anything with like buildings is all about perspective. So when you're trying to clone, it closed really nicely when something is really flat. But if you're talking about the end angle of a building, how do you clone on a building where it's going off in perspective or it has abandon it or something like thes? I want to try and take out this handicap sign, but if I try to clone, it's going really tough because everything is on a slight angle, so I don't know. I mean, I might be able to do it, but gosh, it might be pretty challenging as well. So this tool is this. Functions been around for a while, but it has some very unique times where it's useful and this is one of them. So it I would still do it on a blank layer. That's the want the results of this to be on a separate layer. I'm gonna go to filter menu and shoes, Vanishing Point and the way the vanishing point filter works is let's zoom in a little bit. You look for the angles of the perspective and you just start clicking. So you click here to start and then over here and then down here, and then it kind of fills in the rest. Now, ideally, this is what you'll get if you see a blue grid two thumbs up. If you're doing this and you're seeing yellow, it's like warning. That's not very good. If you see red, it just says you should stop using Photoshopped because you can't even figure out where lines are supposed to go. So if you see red lines, that's not good. Usually that doesn't happen very often to most people. Hopefully, so what I would normally do is try and find one little piece of it. I ultimately want most of this building to be covered, but I want to find lines that are obvious, like those ones there. Then I can extend it up to say if I needed to go right up to here. I don't actually need to in this case at this point, I want to kind of go around the corner. This is where the magic happens, because like that, it just did it for me. I didn't. All I did was I hold down the command key and its senses. There's some other angles there now. It's not necessarily perfect sometimes, but it's pretty close on. You can tweak it accordingly. Okay, so this grid is there now, even though you can't really see it as well when I'm zoomed in. But let's go over here. So now I want to try and take advantage of that grid. The grid is set up the perspective. So now the tools within this command are set up to actually work in perspective, using that grid so they actually is ah, separate clone tool for this function, so it works similarly to the regular clone tool. The interface is a little less obvious because it right now just looks like a pointer. You're kind of like, OK, so you optional click and you get a little plus sign and then you see, it's just there's my clone thing. So now I say, Let's try and line that up right about there Bad for a first shot at it. See how it's kind of covered most of it up now again, Is it actually perfect? Not quite, but is pretty close and certainly much better than any other alternative. So this applies anywhere. You see this little shadow in here and you're thinking that's just enough on an angle that it might be tough. I'm gonna use the arrow keys, make my brush. It'll smaller. So I start again optional. Click here and then try and line it up helps if everyone the room holds their breath. Right now, I almost miss a little bit, but you get the idea. So I'm speeding through a little too fast, but you get the idea. Now, back at step one, I added a new layer, and the reason was so that eventually I'm finished. We're gonna pretend right now that I'm finished. I click OK, and it's on a separate layer. So if I needed to look at it more closely and say, would it help if I took my move tool and nudge this around a bit? Maybe, maybe not, but it might or free transform and then use this warped function to kind of just a little bit. Because sometimes you're just a hair off and this works a lot better. So this is not everyday photo shop unless you spend everyday taking photos of buildings. Now you're doing a happy dance around your living room at this moment because it's like, you know, it really is pretty amazing. Now, with that in mind, how often is to come up? Maybe not that often, but it's not. It's not an obvious thing. If someone, if you looked under filter and solve Vanishing point, would that necessarily tell you clone in perspective? Maybe, Maybe not. And the other thing about this is kind of interesting is if I go back to Vanishing Point. It wasn't smart, but it's still remembers. Oh yeah, that was that grid you had before. So let's see here what I can come up with. How about we take our text tool that we That's actually probably not a bad size right there. But it doesn't look very realistic because it's, you know, sitting there like that. So instead we cut it off of there. I guess I was have to hide it, copy it and hide it. Go back here to vanishing point, click in this area here and choose paste. It's up here, but when I come in here Oh, look at that. Okay, nice now could I have done that myself using some other transformation? Probably. But you know what? I'm too lazy to do that. So that's one of the little things. And I just throw out there because I mean on the grand scheme of things I don't use anywhere near as much as I do retouching methods of like people's faces. But if that's in your arsenal of goodies, in case that time you get that beautiful photograph you taken and looks wonderful. But on the side wall there's a really ugly things sticking out of the walls, which they could cover it up with bricks. And it's in perspective, perspective, vanishing point