Free Photoshop CS5 Content-Aware Fill with the GIMP
In the past few days the guys of Adobe are showing the new features and tools of their Creative Suite CS5, which will be released in April 12. Well, one of the most commented new features is the so called Content-Aware Fill that can identify and replace pixels from the image, and recreate areas of the photo that would need a lot of hand editing to become perfect. At the video below we can take a look on a demo of the new technology presented by Bryan O'Neil Hughes product manager from Photoshop at Adobe. At the video we can see how easy is to erase, replace and fill any areas with the tool.
I don’t have to say how important a tool like this is for architectural visualization, because we can make adjustments and corrections in images, without the need of a new render. Imagine a project where you applied the wrong material or texture on a surface, and after a long render discover that you have to render it again. With a tool like this, we could work on the image to fix it.
It seems that this type of tool is not that new. In fact, we can find a similar tool in GIMP called Resynthesizer. The tool is a plugin for GIMP and can work in the exact same way as the Photoshop Content-Aware. To show the similarities, a few users are posting videos on Youtube using the same photos from Mr. Hughes demo, but using GIMP. Here is one of them:
The resolution of the image for this demo is lower than the one used for the Photoshop CS5 demo, but it’s a fair comparison. The conclusion is that we can get Content-Aware Fill or image Resynthesizer right now and for free with GIMP.
I have to confess myself, I wasn’t aware of this plugin for GIMP until I saw the video. Now, I wonder if we can remove furniture from an architectural visualization image with this tool. I will start to make a few tests, and will post the results here. Even before start, I already know that it will be a great help for architectural visualization.
update: If you want to download Resynthesizer, visit this link.
Comments
Trevor Beach
Excellent post. It is just in the last few days that I heard about this function in CS5. It is great to see it in GIMP. I attempted it and found that the filter is laid out differently than in the video. I was having no luck but finally got excellent results with a low res image. I tried the same setting with a high res image with more poor results. I am looking forward to seeing how you get this to work. Great web site Allan – enjoy your books too….
Tobey
AWESOME stuff!! Only watched the content-aware fill video yesterday… Thanks for sharing!!
🙂
Daniel Blanco
April’s fool, right?
francesco
I used often resynt plugin with gimp, with awesome results.
Since it has been around for a while, I wouldn’t be too surprised if its code would have been pirated by Adobe, we will never know 😉
Piotr
Yes This is April’s fool !!!!
This plug-in to Gimp don’t do it nothing from this post. This is joke.
francesco
@Piotr: Actually resynthesizer does exactly what you can see in the video, and it does it very well too. try and see.
Piotr
I use windows version No. 0.13 this plug-in. I don’t why, but this plug-in don’t work like in this move. Maybe Linux version working better, is newer 0.16. Now – windows version No. 0.13 don’t make this results.
pxl666
well…i can confirm that on windows it seems not to be as awesome as shown on the video above…
i played with resynth a few years ago and rendered it pretty useless for most of the cases – it was on windows too.
today i downloaded and installed gimp and resynth to check if something changed for better…it didnt…if fails to accomplish pretty simple tasks like pimple removal…sorry to say that but the video above seems to be a hoax…not that i do not wish to have the features of content-aware fill for free, but i think it is MUCH more sophisticated that resynthetiser gimp plugin…
francesco
@pxl666- once again: resynthezires does ALL you can see in the video, I don’t know about windows, but on linux IT DOES.
And the adobe tool is not more sophisticated tha resynth, for what i can see it is exactly the same. time to switch to linux maybe?
Staus
Well in my opinion it looks far from the same… When the guy in the video draws circles you can see clear marks from them after th plugin have done its thing. I don’t see any leftovers in the adobe videos..
tim
Hi, Alan:
I noticed the link to logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer points to a zip file with the script/plugin. It appears that the zip file’s internal files have directory paths. Does this mean that the zip file should be placed in the application folder and then extracted? or what?
Exry
Actually, the Resyntehsize-plugin is not so great. Well, it’s free and all, and I love free (free as in freedom) software. But it is clearly not that great yet, and does not do the job as a “removal” tool for me. 🙁
This is to bad as I don’t like the idea of relying on proprietary software. (Read: Adobe’s Photoshop)
InaTux
The second example video comes from our “Development GIMP Version 2.7 Review†article here: http://www.inatux.com/article?r=development-gimp-version-2.7-review
Larry
Great tool
McKay
The plugin is explained in greater detail here:
http://tutorialgeek.blogspot.com/2011/01/gimp-resynthesizer-explained-texture.html