I’ve been playing with the new ‘content aware fill’ feature of Photoshop CS5 over the past few days and it’s amazing. Think of all those instances when you want to remove some person or thing from a photo and yet still have a nice background without laboriously firing up the clone tool or whatever. This is the solution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJfIIqz1myc
It’s great to see big companies coming up with genuinely valuable innovation (you listening Microsoft?) instead of just the small guys. Incidentally the folk behind the Open Source Gimp image processing program claim they can do the same thing with their Resynthesizer plugin, but I’ve tried it and it’s nowhere near as polished or seamless as the Photoshop option. But of course it’s free.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OOYnZyY2rs