Content-aware move tool

The content-aware technology takes on several forms. The healing brush, the patch tool, and the spot healing brush all use the same algorithms to blend color and tone. The Content-aware move tool does the same but in a very unique way.

The picture of a sandhill crane I captured in Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, below, is left of center. The general compositional ‘rule’ (one that I often break) is that a moving subject should be moving toward the center of the frame, not away from it. This is a full frame, uncropped image; obviously it’s difficult and often impossible to compose action shots with deliberation and forethought simply because there usually isn’t time to do that. The action is just too fast.

The easiest way to rectify the composition in this image -- in other words, to move the crane to the right of center -- is to use the Content-aware move tool.

As you can see from the screen capture on the previous page showing the tools palette in Photoshop, the Content-aware move tool is located in the same sub-menu as the Healing brush tool.

The first thing I did was use the Lasso tool to draw a selection around the bird. In the below image I highlighted the marching ants to make them easily visible. It is not necessary to make a duplicate layer.

Note how much of the background I included in the selection, and also note the selection doesn’t have to be precise at all. Using a stylus and a Wacom tablet to proscribe the selection is a lot easier than using a typical mouse. There is much more control and it’s much less awkward when working on selections that need to be precise.

Next, I selected the Content-aware move tool and dragged the selected area of the bird and a little bit of the background to the right, to the new position where I wanted the crane to be. A box forms around the selection as you can see in the screen capture on the next page. The fact that some of the selected area lays on top of the original image is not a problem.

I then clicked Return (or enter) on the keyboard, and the content-aware technology did its magic. The image of the bird left of center disappears and it’s replaced by itself, but now it is positioned perfectly on the right and the background is blended as if there was no Photoshop work at all. The final result is shown

below right.

This technique works for all kinds of subjects including people, trees, animals, architecture, cars, and more. Sometimes it’s not perfect, of course, because a lot depends on the complexity and uniformity of the background as well as the size of the subject relative to the entire image. Sometimes the technique works great as in the photo below left where I re-positioned the two trees with the sun from the center to the right. If you look closely, though, some of the cloud shapes are duplicated. In this instance, you have to do some additional work, usually with the clone tool, to make sure repeating lines or shapes are eliminated or obscured in some way. Always pay attention to these kinds of details. §