Photoshop CS5 for Photographers What’s Hot & New

by Robert Berdan June 27, 2010

Adobe released its new version of Photoshop CS5 in June of 2010. The new product boasts several new features including:

Content Aware Fill

Of these new features the most interesting ones are content aware fill and puppet Warp. Content aware fill allows the photographer to select an object or region of the photo with the patch tool then select Edit>Fill >Content aware and the fill does a remarkable job of filling in the area so it looks like the original object never existed. See the photos below with the grizzly bear and hiker. In one example I selected the grizzly bear and used Content aware fill and in the other I removed the hiker. In both cases its difficult to see where the original subjects were in the photograph.

Original photograph of a Bear and Hiker - Ruth Labarge bear trainer and Grizzly bear movie star Ali Oop.

In the photo above I selected the bear with the patch tool, then I selected Edit>Fill>Content Aware and the bear disappears.

In this photo - I selected Ruth and filled with Content Aware and she disappears. The program automatically fills in
the area to simulate the background.

Puppet Warp

This tool allows you to select objects in your photograph and warp them into different shapes. For example in the picture below of the blue heron, I copied the image of the bird on the branch and pasted it back into a new layer. Selected Edit >Puppet Warp> placed several pins (yellow circles) then pulled on the pins to distort the picture of the bird. When done hit ENTER. You can take almost any subject and bend them into new positions.

I took the Blue heron above, selected it and then pasted it on a the original photo into a a new layer.

I flipped the image over so the bird faced to the left and made the canvas size a little bit larger. Then I selected Edit>Puppet warp, added some pins (yellow circles) over the mesh that appears and then pull to distort or bend the subject.

Of Course I could bend the subject more but just wanted to make the bird on the right look a little different from the one
on the left. It is possible to distort the subject much more then this. This is obviously a digital manipulated image and many nature photographers will choose not to do this type of manipulation, the point is it can be done (DM).

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