PHOTOSHOP CC
VANISHING ACT
James Paterson shows you how new contentaware tools can be used to clean up RAWs
Many of us who’ve been using Adobe editing tools for years find there’s less and less reason to open our images in Photoshop CC. Instead, Camera Raw and Lightroom offer almost everything we need. But for precise retouching work, Photoshop has always been better – until now. Updates to Camera Raw and Lightroom include a healing feature that could be a gamechanger for your RAW editing workflow, as now we can use Content-Aware Fill to process our RAW photographs, Content-Aware Fill lets you target an object, then watch as Photoshop removes it. Now, we can use it with the Healing brush in Camera Raw, as well as with the near-identical tools in Lightroom’s Develop Module. So if there’s a distracting object or detail that you want to be rid of, you can simply paint over it. Of course, it’s not going to be perfect every time. But with the other features in the Healing tool, you can always tidy up. Once done, you can finish the image with one of our 10 free winter-themed profiles, see the download link on the left…
STEP BY STEP DITCH THE DISTRACTIONS
Use new features in ACR and Lightroom Classic CC to remove intruders!
Open your photo or our free start.jpg image in Camera Raw (or in Lightroom, import the image and go to the Develop Module). You’ll find the Healing Brush in the toolbar, or you can hit B. With Content-Aware mode selected, paint over objects to remove them. It analyses the content and generates new pixels to fill the area. Here, it lets us remove tourists around the waterfall seamlessly.
After filling an area with the Content-Aware Fill tool, you may find that the first attempt isn’t right. Hit Refresh to make the tool try again, or tap the / key. If this doesn’t give you the results you want, hold Cmd/Ctrl and drag to make a rectangular box over part of the photo. This lets you target
