Photoshop Elements 9 is Here!

When Adobe brought out Photoshop Elements 9 recently they added content aware to the healing brush tool.  Content Aware is a valuable feature in Photoshop CS5.   (See my post about Content Aware Fill on Photoshop CS5 from July 20, 2010)

Content aware in Photoshop Elements 9 has been added to the spot healing brush as a default setting in the upper tool bar and works somewhat differently.  Let me show you some comparisons.

In the original photo above, I will remove the dark spots on the flower.  In Photoshop CS5 I circled all the dark spots on the flower with the lasso tool at the same time by holding the shift key to add the other small circles.  Using Edit

For the spot healing tool in Photoshop Elements 9 content aware is selected in the upper tool bar, but I had to use the brush over the spots one at a time, so they can't be done all at once.  Just takes a little more time, but the results are the same.

Now here is where it changes a bit from the 2 programs.

Starting here I want to remove the feet and the piece of garbage from the grate.  First I will show you what happened with content aware fill in Photoshop CS5

Now Photoshop Elements 9

You can see that the top part isn't too different, but the grate is not as good, so I tried again.

A little different results for this correction.

Now I want to show you something that I like to do with the Content Aware Fill. Instead of taking unwanted parts of the image out, I fill what could be called the background with the main part of the image.  This gives a different affect with the 2 programs.

 

 Original Image

I selected all the parts of the ground around the image and Photoshop CS5 filled it like this.

Then I did the same thing with the spot healing brush in Photoshop Elements and here it is.

You get a different interpretation of pixels.

In Photoshop CS5 you can easily select areas, my tools of choice are the lasso tool and the pen tool.
In Elements the tool is the spot healing brush and isn't quite as easy to make a selection when you want to change such as the one with the red flower.  I will be doing some tutorials on my Inside KathyAnne Art blog on this subject in the future, so check there from time to time.