Photoshop Tutorial: Content Aware really IS your friend!

Hey!

Yeah i know, off the radar again! I would love to say the reason for my blogging absence is due to being so mega busy that there simply aren’t enough hours in the day…etc…etc…

Fact is - i’ve been too lazy! Ok, a little bit busy too, but mainly lazy!

Anyhoo - as the title suggests, we’re going to touch a little on photoshop.

A couple of weeks ago I was over at Theater Oberhausen, doing a promo shoot for an upcoming production.

You’ll note, that yes, i have shot slightly less insane things.

The above image is straight out of camera. You’ll not that we’re shooting inside a built set, within a larger hall. We were actually in the set building hall belonging to the theatre. No much room to shoot inside this wooden box, and a ton of natural light flooding in through the windows.

It needed to be a moody shot anyway, so killing the ambient light and bringing in flash was always on the cards. The biggest problem though was framing the shot. I shot with the widest glass i had - 17mm on a FF sensor - and had to hold the camera to my side against the wall, so i had no real idea what i was shooting.

Anyway, because of the constraints i had, this meant there would be a fairly heavy chunk of post production coming my way in order to keep this shot wide-looking, but having it look like were just in this stripy room!

The final image

Obviously, i’m not a genius, and don’t have hours and hours to spend bringing images through post production. But, the content aware tool is your friend. Selecting parts of the image that are outside of our little ‘room’, and using the Content Aware fill, really does help to speed up the process. In most cases, it’s pretty accurate in expanding the background.

There’s obviously going to be some imperfections to the background, but they can be tidied up using the clone stamp tool, and with some creative (and fairly liberal) use of dodge, burn and vignette, the image came up good!

Here’s another example:

Note the wall to the right of the finished image also came through CA Fill successfully

Content aware is a fairly simple thing to use: use lasso, patch, pen tool, selection brush - whatever you prefer to select an area - hit delete, select content aware, hit enter - job done! There may be some fixing to do afterwards, particularly with busy images, however, the hit-rate is pretty good!

So, this wasn’t really meant as a photoshop tutorial, but whatever! Thanks for reading!

Until next time!

Ant

Buy your own shizzle! Lightroom Presets Now Available!

Hey guys!

Anyone who dropped by the shop recently will have seen something new!

For the first time, i’m offering up some Lightroom Preset Packs! That’s right kids, now you can edit in one click - apeman style.

Currently, there are two Lightroom Preset packs available, both containing 5 presets. One set colour, and one set of bangin’ black and whites!

And whats more - they’re at a crazy stupid low introductory price - so get on it, check them out!

Just make sure you purchase and download the packs on a real computer! Phones don’t like that sort of thing!

much love

Ant