Photoshop CS5 first impressions on Content Aware Fill

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Well I downloaded Photoshop CS5 three days ago and have given a few things a go that I was excited to see like Content Aware Fill.

I am yet to give it a real good go but so far there are a few things I have found. Firstly I currently use a 24 inch Imac running 4GB RAM on a 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo on Leopard.

Content Aware Fill (CAF) errors out when filling in a small amount of white space around a 350MB @ 240 dpi stitch saying I’m out of RAM (I let photoshop use 3 gig of my 4 gig ram). To get it to work I have to drop my stitch down in pixel size. When using the magic want tool to select white space with CAF it works best if you add overlapping pixels or you get an harsh blend. CAF takes ages to be applied to an image. When CAF is applied to a shot to fill in white space the blending is hit and miss and when it works I personally don’t think it is print quality. The application works great for repairing certain parts of shots and defects.

Overall I find CS5 runs a lot slower compared to CS4. Photoshop and Bridge working together is also slower. Over the coming days I will have a more in depth play with CS5 and see how it goes and get back to you. Would love to hear some other peoples thoughts and experience on CAF and also the speed of CS5 on your system.

9 thoughts on “Photoshop CS5 first impressions on Content Aware Fill

  1. A handy tip I’ve come across is that if you don’t like the way CAF renders an area, then hit Ctrl+Z to undo, and then apply CAF again and it searchs for slightly different areas/textures to blend.

    Keep doing the above until you get a blend/repair that suits

  2. From what I’ve seen, CAF is not for final, quality prints, it may be a bit of a gimmicky thing . Anyone I know who has tried it has had an issue with the operating speed of CS5.

    Although it is only early days it seems like it may have a few teething troubles.

    • Thanks Merv. Yea is does seam a bit gimmicky and probably not for high resolution printing. Perfect for other smaller types of printing like magazines etc.

      Glad to hear some other people are finding CS5 slower. Yes all early days. I remember CS2’s photomerge was quite crappy now is fantastic. I’m sure CAF will get better in time.

  3. I’ve been using CS5 at home (we’ll be switching next week at work) since the day the trial came out and so far I’ve been very impressed with the speed and performance.

    I think CAF has been over hyped as some magical ‘do it all for you’ tool, in reality the examples that demonstrations have given aren’t really an ideal use for the technology. What it really should be used for is a base to start your cloning/healing workflow. The results it produces are fast and do a decent job, but you shouldn’t just leave it there, you need to go back over it manually and make it right, there’s no way for the program to know what you wanted it to do, it’s just going to look for patterns to work with.

    On the speed front, the UI feels as snappy as ever and some of the filters have seen noticeable speed increases. But I’m on a Windows 7 machine with a quad core i7 and 8GB of RAM at home.

    I hate the new ‘scrubbing zoom’, I turned that off right away. And I was annoyed that they didn’t fix a few of the minor UI issues that CS4 introduced, but overall I’m happy with the upgrade.

  4. I have to agree that the CAF feature is more gimmick than anything else. Having said that I’ve found it can (randomly) do an OK good job filling in the white space around a stiched image. If nothing else it is a good starting point before using the cloning tool to fix up all the mismatched textures. Whether it will really be a printable option or not will require more testing.

    As far as performance goes I have a virtually identical PC to Levi and I’ve found it to be a slight performance improvement over CS4. Mind you I have also recently removed Norton 360 which hepled a fair bit too :).

    Also can’t wait for the new Adobe Configurator V2 to be released so I can get my panels back again.

  5. Ive found that cs5 is quite a lot faster then cs4 I run an 8 core mac pro with 10 gig of ram, it does seem to need quite a lot of ram! Like u say content aware is a bit hit n miss but it’s good for small areas I’ve found.

    • Gee now that sounds like a nice set up 🙂 I think more RAM would help the speed a lot with my system. Some things run a lot faster like filters but general image processing, flattening, opening 1 gig layered files is really slow.

      I’m finding content aware fill great for spotting my drum scans. Beats the healing tool but I have to use the clone tool for some things still.

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