Adobe Photoshop CS6 offers some impressive new retouching and re-composition tools. The new Content-Aware Move/Extend Tool is supremely powerful and magical tool in Photoshop CS6. It will allow you to select pixels and move or extend them to another area of your image without the use of layers and masks.
Used image
Let’s get started with Content-Aware Move Tool first.
Open an image which you need to move an object from one place to another in Adobe Photoshop CS6.
Now I wanted to move the picture of the girl from right side to the center of the field. Hence first we need to make a selection around the girl picture that you want to move using “Lasso Tool” or “Quick Selection Tool”. Here I have used the “Quick Selection Tool” to make the selection.
The selection settings of the “Quick Selection Tool” are given below.
You can adjust the “+” brush to include more selection area and “-” brush to decrease the selection area according to your wish and perfection.
Finally I have made selection of the girl as above. In making selection make sure that the selection should not be very close to the edge of the picture and there should be some distance.
Thereafter go to Select > Modify > Expand
It will open an “Expand Selection” dialogue box, there you can specify the size of the selection how much you need to expand it. Here I have given 5px and Click “Ok“.
Once I clicked the button “Ok”, the selection will expand as if in the below image
Note: Content-Aware Move Tool will allow you to seamlessly move objects in your photos. The Content-Aware Move Tool contains two options. Move and Extend.
Now select “Content-Aware Move Tool” and then choose Mode > Move. Move is used to seamlessly move the objects in the photos.
Along with this tool we can use one setting named “Adaptation” to control the flexibility to blend the image. In Adaptation drop down, you can find 5 levels from very strict to very loose. Selecting very loose will give Photoshop more control over blending in the image while selecting very strict will give more of a hard line around the selection.
Once you create your selection, simply drag the object to the new location and drop it. CS6 algorithms manage and replace the newly aligned and deleted object seamlessly into the same layer.
It automatically fills in the hole with matching elements from the existing background and also remove it from the old location.
Here you can see the final image after moving the girl from right side to the center of the field using “Content-Aware Move Tool“
The final image we get after using the “Move Tool” is as below
Let’s take a look at “Extend Tool” and its use.
Extend is used to extend the length of objects in order to change your composition. The object would be duplicated and not moved.
Set the tool option to “Extend”. Now just move the girl picture to the other side of a picture.
Hence along with the original image, a duplicated image also forms as below using the Extend Tool.
The final image after using the “Extend Tool” is here
