Content Aware Crop – New for Photoshop CC

If you are a Photoshop Creative Cloud user, you know you now have access to a series of new features in the latest version of Photoshop CC.  Content aware crop is one of those features that has been teased for a awhile.  I sat down and gave it a try to see how well it works, and what it can mean to your post production workflow.

So, let’s give it a whirl.

I have this Super Color Infrared image I made in Cades Cove before this years Great Smoky Mountains workshop.   Yeah, it’s crooked, . .  . big time.  We’ve all done this before, and I did reshoot, but maybe this image can be salvaged.

Now in previous versions of Photoshop you could level an image, however that often meant losing some of the image when it cropped.  Content aware cropping is designed to fix that.

Let’s see what we can do with it.

Once open in Photoshop. You will select the Crop Tool

Then check the box at the top for content aware

Now select Straighten.  The icon next to the word is designed to look like a bubble level.

 

Then draw a line to mark where the horizon should be.

Once you click at the end, Photoshop will automatically center the image and show you the image with crop lines in place.  You will notice blank areas within the canvas.  These areas inside the crop lines will be automatically filled in if you select this crop.

Now you have a few choices.  If you click enter, or the check mark to the right of the word content aware.  Either will crop the image and fill in the areas that were blank.

However, if you choose to, you can extend the crop line to include any area.

Once you click enter or the check mark, Photoshop will fill int blank area. Now let’s compare.  The left side is the original image, the right is with Content Aware crop.

Photoshop was able to keep all of the image captured by adding to the sky and the field.  It looks pretty good to me.  There is some repetition i one area of  the clouds, but that can be corrected if it seems necessary.

So, I think that the new content aware crop does have some potential.  After trying it a few time I will tell it doesn’t work perfectly every single time, but it is a vast improvement over losing a chunk of your image.

Have you tried it yet?  Tell me what you think.