Back in a previous tutorial, we looked at how to stitch multiple photos together to create a panoramic image using the Photomerge command in Photoshop CS4. We won't get into details here on how to create panoramic images since we covered it in the other tutorial, but if you've used Photomerge before, you'll be familiar with the problem seen in the image below. This is the panorama I created in the tutorial as it appeared right after running the Photomerge command, which left me with lots of empty blank space around the image:

Normally (as in prior to Photoshop CS5), we'd get rid of all that blank space by simply cropping it away with the Crop Tool, but let's see what happens when we let Photoshop try to replace the blank areas with actual image detail using Content-Aware Fill.

I've gone ahead and merged all of the layers onto a single layer, and I'll quickly select the image by holding down my Ctrl (Win) / Command (Mac) key and clicking directly on the preview thumbnail in the Layers panel:

As soon as I click on the thumbnail, a selection outline appears around the image:

At the moment, the image is selected, but I don't want to fill the image with anything. I want to fill the blank space around it, so I need to invert my selection, which will select the blank areas and deselect the image. To do that, I could go up to the Select menu at the top of the screen and choose Inverse, but I'll use the faster keyboard shortcut Shift+Ctrl+I (Win) / Shift+Command+I (Mac):

With the blank area now selected, I'll go up to the Edit menu and choose Fill, just as I did before, and I'll select the new Content-Aware option at the top:

I'll click OK to exit out of the dialog box, and after waiting a few moments for Photoshop to analyze the image, we get the results. I'll press Ctrl+D (Win) / Command+D (Mac) to remove the selection outline so we can see the image better:

Does Photoshop CS5 have some serious wow factor going on? I would say so. Again, the results aren't perfect. There's an obvious dark blotch in the clouds in the top right corner of the image and some of the water along the far left and right edges appears blurry, but Content-Aware Fill was able to do 80-90% of the work for me in a matter of seconds, leaving me with nothing more than a quick clean up with one of the other retouching tools. I'd call that impressive!

As we've seen, Content-Aware Healing and Content-Aware Fill are great new additions in Photoshop CS5, but they're certainly not the only new features. More are on the way!

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