Skip to main content

Adobe's amazing new crop tool for Photoshop CC can intelligently fill in backgrounds

Introducing Content-Aware Crop: Coming Soon to Photoshop CC
Adobe made the lives of photographers exponentially easier when it introduced its Content-Aware Fill and Heal tool in Photoshop CS5 back in 2010. Two years later, it further simplified image processing with the introduction of Content-Aware Move in Photoshop CS6. Now, the company is pushing the boundaries yet again with its contextually-aware editing tool in the form of a new feature called Content-Aware Crop.

Illustrated in the above video demo, this new tool is capable of filling in missing visuals when you crop and rotate an image. Oftentimes, when cropping an image and accounting for rotation, you end up losing subject matter around the edge of the photograph. Now, Photoshop will be able to automatically account for the would-be whitespace and fill it in with computer-generated content taken from elsewhere in the image.

In the example shown, Photoshop is able to intelligently fill out the scene of a young boy in front of a lifeguard chair on the beach when it’s cropped to straighten out the horizon. Rather than leaving it as blank space, where you would previously have to clone-stamp the sand, sky, and water into the image, Content-Aware Crop automatically does the work with imperceivable differences between where the frame once ended and computer-generated sand and sky begins.

It should be noted that this won’t work on all photographs. But for images where the subject matter is in the center and the edges aren’t busy with details, it should work without much hassle.

No specific timeframe has been given for the new feature, but Adobe says its Creative Cloud subscribers will get it in the next major release of Photoshop CC.

Editors' Recommendations

Gannon Burgett
Fujifilm’s successor to the wildly popular X100V has just landed
fujifilm unveils x100v successor x100vi

Fujifilm has finally unveiled the successor to its super-popular X100V camera.

The X100VI (or “6” ... more on the messy naming system later) is the first new X100 camera in four years and the sixth in the series. And for many (especially those who’ve been trying to get hold of the X100V), it can’t come soon enough.

Read more
How to download Instagram photos for free
Instagram app running on the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5.

Instagram is amazing, and many of us use it as a record of our lives — uploading the best bits of our trips, adventures, and notable moments. But sometimes you can lose the original files of those moments, leaving the Instagram copy as the only available one . While you may be happy to leave it up there, it's a lot more convenient to have another version of it downloaded onto your phone or computer. While downloading directly from Instagram can be tricky, there are ways around it. Here are a few easy ways to download Instagram photos.

Read more
Astronaut captures stunning images of a snowy Grand Canyon
A snow-covered Grand Canyon seen from space.

In the final days of his six-month stint aboard the International Space Station (ISS), Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen took some time out of his science work to snap some striking photos of a snow-covered Grand Canyon.

The images were captured from the station in recent days as it orbited Earth at an altitude of around 250 miles.

Read more