Photoshop in 60 Seconds: Content Aware Fill in Practice

Using Content Aware Fill in Adobe Photoshop

Welcome to our Photoshop in 60 Seconds series, in which you can learn a Photoshop skill, feature, or technique in just a minute!

This time around, we're looking at Content Aware Fill. Whether you are editing your own photo or working on one from Envato Market, this automated feature can save you precious retouching time!

And if you want to learn more about how to use Photoshop, view our popular course for beginners. It takes you through all the essential Photoshop features—including a lesson on content aware scale.

Photoshop in 60 Seconds: Content Aware Fill

There are several tools in Photoshop designed to help remove unwanted objects from an image and replace those objects with choice pixels from other portions of the image. Most of these tools require manual strokes. But the Content Aware Fill feature can automatically sample pixels from the area surrounding a selection and seamlessly fill that selection with new pixels. It seems almost magical!

If you've got just a minute, I'll show you just how it works. And download the image of Monument Valley available from our stock site, PhotoDune.

How to Use the Content Aware Fill Feature

In this image, we're going to use Content-Aware Fill to remove this background formation.

How to Remove Objects with Content Aware Fill

First, let's make a Copy of the Background Layer. Let's use the Lasso Tool (L) to create a very quick Selection around this background formation.

Use the Lasso Tool to Create a Selection

The Content Aware feature is found through the Edit > Fill dialog box, by changing the content from the default Foreground Color to Content Aware and clicking OK.

Photoshop then automatically samples the surrounding area to fill in the selected area.

Want to see this in action? Check out the video above to see this incredible feature at work!

A Bit More Detail

Want to learn more about Adobe Photoshop's vast tools and settings? Check out these tutorials below:

60 Seconds?!

This is part of a new series of quick video tutorials on Envato Tuts+. We’re aiming to introduce a range of subjects, all in 60 seconds—just enough to whet your appetite. Let us know in the comments what you thought of this video and what else you’d like to see explained in 60 seconds!