*** From the Archives ***

This article is from October 22, 2009, and is no longer current.

See Photoshop's Amazing Patch Match

A four-person team (Connelly Barnes and Adam Finkelstein of Princeton University and Eli Shechtman and Dan B. Goldman of Adobe Systems) have been working on technology that fills in parts of an image you edit out more intelligently than Photoshop CS4’s Spot Healing Brush and Edit/Fill commands. The result is a “new randomized algorithm for quickly finding approximate nearest neighbor matches between image patches.”
Sound boring? Wait till you see it in action in a video on Adobe’s Facebook page. In the meantime, check out these before-and-after from the video:


  • Anonymous says:

    What are those things in the sky, below the arrowhead in the “After” photo of the family vacation? Could Patch Match have added birds when it removed the tree?

  • Anonymous says:

    Fine to promote such a quick and dirty feature, but it would also be helpful to discuss for what type of output resolution it’s actually good for and also show 100% of the finished Patch. If this is good only for low res web output, that’s one thing, but don’t mislead your readers if it’s going to do a horrible job and need lots of corrections for any high res outputs or when viewed at 100% as our editors do when scrutenizing our work.

    I am for one so very tired or stupid quick and dirty techniques that go no where for high res work but yet are talked about as the next salvation, but with no regard to the exact end use, nor show 100% views of the work at the end resolution. Anything can look good enough of the web.

  • T_J says:

    Wow.

    I remember the story that everyone used to tell when digital imaging first came into general awareness.

    A lady comes into a photo lab with a print of park scene. In the center of the image is a large tree. She asks: “Can you take this tree out so I can see what’s behind it?”

    That was a joke once, but now we know—behind the tree is a cloud. I can’t wait for this to come in Photoshop.

  • Anonymous says:

    I buy PS CS5 but I did not found “Patch Match”. I saw on You Tube tutorials, but I found not patchmatch in my PS CS5 ext.
    Where are he? Thank you.

  • Terri Stone says:

    In the shipping version of Photoshop CS5, it is called Content-Aware Fill.

    Terri Stone
    Editor in Chief, CreativePro.com

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