We're All Puppets

Aside from "Content Aware Fill", the other big new bright shining function in Adobe Photoshop CS5 is called "Puppet Warp". View the demonstration video below for the wowee zowee but it essentially allows you greater flexibility in automatically manipulating imagery.

Automatic for the people:


Pretty nifty, yeh?

Well, even more so than in the Content Aware Fill demos, this Puppet Warp demo offers ideal fodder to manipulate. Which is fine: it more clearly demonstrates the possibilities.

But what can you do with a more complex image, with the absolute LEAST amount of skill and effort...?

Glad you asked.

As I'm sure most people are doing once they get their dirty little hands on CS5, I'm experimenting with photos I've had for ages. This is one I scanned in from a traditional photograph, over a DECADE ago:

If he looks familiar to you, it's actor Zachary P. Taylor who I actually went to college with back in the day! (It's true!!)

There are a few striking reasons this is a more complicated photograph to manipulate:
1) The background is cluttered, with no large, repeating patterns.
2) His legs are crossed.
3) He's got one hand in his pocket. (And the other one is hailing a taxi cab.)
4) Ethics.

All well and good—you say, —but what's it going to be, then, eh?

Animated GIF.
(Did you honestly have to ask...?)

This one, admittedly, took a few minutes.

In addition to "Puppet Warp", I used one quick pass of our new best friend "Content Aware Fill" along with some old cheap standard cutting-and-pasting trick ponies. The idea being NOT to make the BEST photo manipulation possible using Photoshop CS5 but to make the FASTEST photo manipulation possible. Using cutting edge cheap tricks.

In honor of this method, I'm calling this latest animated gif masterpiece...


"I Want You to Want Me"...


To be clear, I probably haven't seen Zach since 1995 or 1996—just in case you might be suspecting that I painstakingly recreated the photo with Zach and merely took several pictures of him posing in different positions. I understand why you would suspect this because the end result is so startlingly, uncannily photorealistic. Rest assured, I just used Photoshop and an animated gif program to produce this spectacle. (I'm not even sure that Zach's still alive, or that he still calls himself "Zach Taylor".)

Oh, we have fun.

THE FINAL WORD:
I like CS5 a lot. It makes some remarkable advances and includes plenty of fun new toys to help betray the trust of the world at large. I've no doubt that CS10 will include a function to automatically render images of dreams you had the night before. And CS20 is obviously destined to become fully sentient before it learns a method to erase humanity from the planet. So say we all.

The Limitations of Content Aware Fill

The new Adobe Photoshop CS5 is out there, complete with its seemingly magical Content Aware Fill functionality.

I was pretty excited to get my mitts on it... but as is often the case with effective advertising, the miraculous demos have been carefully crafted to play to the strengths of "Content Aware Fill". Note how they focus on images with large, regular landscapes, and removing objects from them. Indeed, the new Photoshop excels at erasing things from pictures.

[Each of these images represents what I accomplished with one quick pass using Content Aware Fill. Literally just a matter of seconds.]

Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World" is beautiful and haunting and evocative, perhaps, but wouldn't it be better without that woman and those houses in the background...?

CONTENT AWARE FILL!

Street artist Banksy has surely done some gorgeous, thought-provoking work... but isn't it REALLY just glorified vandalism...?

CONTENT AWARE FILL!

SPOILER ALERT if you haven't seen Truffaut's The 400 Blows (I realize that some of you don't like to see a movie during its first weekend, preferring instead to see it on its 2,652nd weekend) but it ends on this iconic shot of this boy wading into the ocean. But did we really need the boy in the shot...?

CONTENT AWARE FILL!!!

(Part of the functionality requires that you yell this out each time you use it, FYI.)

Again, these images feature large spaces. There are some complex patterns but there's a lot of the pattern for the program to draw upon. And we're removing relatively small things from the images.

What happens when the images are more complex with less patterns and more structural architecture to fill in? Perhaps it's predictable...

Content Aware Fill bugs the fuck out.

In this example, you'd think that maybe the patterned wallpaper would be right up C.A.F.'s alley, but we are gouging out a large portion of the image and asking the program to extrapolate something far more complex: carpet and walls and a door frame that is largely blocked by the twin girls. You can certainly erase those girls using a number of other methods (like therapy), but C.A.F. isn't the best tool for this job.

In this example, one dog goes one way, the other dog goes the other way, and this guy's sayin, "Why do I need these dogs in this boat with me?"

Well, Guy With A Nice Head of White Hair, I tried to help you out using a little C.A.F. but it was a little too complex. This one represents a few extra passes with C.A.F. and spot-fixing, and it's better than I might've imagined, but obviously too complicated. The program's built to reconstruct patterns, not rebuild anatomy.

Guess we'll have to wait for Adobe Photoshop CS6...

Content-Aware Filler

This is one for the geeks but HOLY SHIT—I want this.

Yes, it'll eventually get abused and very poorly implemented by a great lot of people. And kids will grow up completely taking it for granted that these tools exist and are so easy to use.

And yet I cannot wait. The possibilities are endless...