The actual stickers are 4″x4″. If you want one for free, ask Ben.

I remain dubious.

Disclaimer up front: I think content-aware fill looks awesome, and I agree that it will simplify a whole lot of tedious tasks in Photoshop. When I’m able to afford CS5 (or, if I’m lucky, when my job buys it for me), I’m sure I’ll get plenty of use out of it, just as I have the last several improvements in CS4 and earlier versions. I’m not hating for the sake of hating; I’m just tempering my expectations.

So what is my beef? I’m not convinced any new tool can be as revolutionary as content-aware fill is being hyped to be. Content-aware fill will be a useful tool in the right hands, but it will not make anyone a competent designer or editor any more than Auto-Tune can make anyone a competent singer. It will be a good tool, but it won’t significantly change anything

I remember similar pants-wetting for the previews of spot healing and content-aware scaling. Both were tools that would “revolutionize” how we did things. Both tools are useful, and I use each regularly, but my work in design or photo-editing is largely the same as it was before the tools. Both of these tools simplify the solutions to previously tedious problems, but both still rely on the user to have an end goal in mind; both require the user to understand the tools’ effects well enough to know how they will help accomplish the end goal. In short, these tools—including content-aware fill—are not shortcuts to expertise. The capacity for composing and creating effective work is in the mind of the artist or crafter, not the tools.

Will an over-reliance on the tools in photo editing make content-aware fill become the Auto-Tune of Photoshop. Auto-Tune was intended to fine-tune an otherwise competent singer’s performance by artificially adjusting the pitch of the note sung back into key. Push a note too far or too fast, however, and you end up with the auto-tune artifacts that betray the tool’s use. While this effect is sometimes used intentionally (see T-Pain or Auto-Tune the News), it more often serves as a subtle reminder that most pop musicians’ vocal talent is severely lacking.

Similarly, content-aware fill may become a lazy substitute for actually understanding how to compose a photo or design in the first place. Don’t worry about good source material when you can just add, subtract, or fix it later. I’ll have to get my hands on Photoshop CS5 to be sure, but I suspect that content-aware fill will leave telltale signs of its use, betraying those who employ it sloppily.

While this may provide Photoshop Disasters with a whole new category of material, it will more likely just convince more untalented hacks to undercut the market with their crap work. But like I said, it’s not like these new tools really change much.

What do you think? Is content-aware fill is a game-changer or just hype? Let’s hear it in the comments.

A ticket I designed for KiraMesa and The Basement. The illustration is by Ben Lalli.

I was running out of original ideas for posters, so I ripped the idea for this one from a classic Red Hot Chili Peppers poster. Everything was hand done, though. With sloppy typesetting like that, though, maybe I shouldn’t admit to creating it all by hand.