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by Mike McNamee Published 01/02/2011
Another common use is for extending the bleed around the spine of a book or magazine. The photographer should have arrived at a pleasing balance of the image within its frame. Now the designer needs 10mm extra on the left - problem! Content-Aware scaling makes this task seamless and very quick indeed.
For retouching work the use of the Spot-healing brush and Content- Aware mode or Content-Aware filling is powerful and provides an added dimension to the previous spot-healing methods. This tool earns its keep for the fast removal of skin blemishes or the eradication of things such as power cables from a scene.
The Mixer Brush
The standard brush icon hides a new fly-out menu that provides The Pencil Tool, the Color Replacement Tool and the new Mixer Brush. Instead of just flow and opacity the mixer brush provides Wet, Load, Mix and Flow. The Wet value controls the amount of underlying colour that is pushed into the brush tip. With a Wet value of 100% we used a Flat Fan variant from the brush panel to drag out colour to break up the hard frame edge and also to simplify the outer portions of the image. A print onto canvas completed the effect.
The Brush Preview depicts the shape of the brush tip and the density of the bristles. The bristle stiffness may also be varied.
Comparison with Corel Painter is an obvious topic for a reviewer. Painter is certainly faster, we found a need to slow down in CS5 otherwise we found ourselves about 20 brush strokes ahead of the screen view. Overall CS5 is easier to user than Painter (assuming you are well-versed in Photoshop!). Painter retains the edge for looser, more creative interpretations and the wider range of under-surface options and brush types. Overall though, CS5 is perfect for the occasional user of this style of painting.
The Refine Edge/Refine Mask Tools
Cutting out a model with wispy, flyaway hair is always a problem and, perversely, is something that the Photoshop beginner always wants to tackle early on in their apprenticeship! A succession of thirdparty plug-ins for masking and cut-outs have always been developed alongside Photoshop and, traditionally, technology from them has often been incorporated into later upgrades to Photoshop itself.
The latest addition (to the refine Mask of CS4) is Decontaminate Colors, a method of dealing with those telltale polluting colours caused by diffraction of the background colour around fine hair. The interface has been freshened up with the viewing options relegated to a drop-down menu. Hair cut-outs remain a challenge and the reader is referred to either Martin Evening's book Photoshop for Photographers or the Gry Garness' retouching DVD we reviewed recently (Garness, in fact, describes the new cut-out feature as 'the best new feature in CS5'). It is interesting that both authors employ quite a range of refinements, indeed Garness seems to use half the Photoshop toolbox to get the job done - small wonder that this task remains in the domain of the experts, despite what some would have us believe.
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