Get Rid of It
You can’t always get the shot you want. People walk in front of the landmark you’re photographing. Power lines drape historic buildings. No one can resist scooping up a handful of snow, ruining your vision of a pristine winter scene. Retouching with the clone brush is a long, slow job and since Microsoft Picture It! was discontinued, there hasn’t been a really sophisticated tool for significant touchups. Adobe claims that Content-Aware Fill "magically" fills in the space left behind when you remove objects with the spot healing brush or even the lasso. You can remove complex shapes from complex backgrounds and hardly be able to see they were ever there, while it’s utterly simple to use. If there’s one feature in Photoshop CS5 that’s almost worth the purchase price on its own, it’s this.
If you need to remove a power line, the edge of a sign, a blemish on a face, or anything that’s small and easy to draw over as well as anything where you want to choose what to move with small precise movements, you can set content-aware fill as an option on the spot healing brush.
The content-aware fill fills in the area you want to get rid of by synthesizing pieces of the background and matching them to the edges of the background at the edge of your selection. It matches the lighting and the tonal range as well as the texture and even the amount of noise, which means that it’s almost impossible to tell anything has gone as long as the textures match up. If you want to move an object in an image you can use the new selection options to cut the object out precisely and put it on a layer, then fill in the background area where you’ve removed it and then drop it into place elsewhere.
With the spot healing brush, you have to remove everything in one selection while not letting go of the mouse for the best results (if you do the removal in stages, you’re reducing the amount of original detail Photoshop has to work with). If that’s not so easy, you can just use the lasso tool to select the area as roughly as you want and use the Content-Aware option in the Fill dialog and get the same impressive results. The results aren’t always completely perfect, but they are usually astonishingly good.
