The guys at Adobe have released a sneak peak of a new feature they are developing for Photoshop CS5 called content-aware fill. It is quite impressive in what it can achieve; users are now able to fill areas of an image that are otherwise blank, or replace objects in a photo entirely, with one press of the delete key. The program then analyses all the surrounding pixels and fills the selected area with an approximation of what it thinks should go there.

Users of GIMP are not that impressed as this feature has been possible for quite some time using a GIMP plugin called Resynthesizer, created by Paul Harrison. Professional Photoshoppers are also wary that, while contnet-aware fill will reduce workload greatly in the future, it will probably cause hundreds and thousands of amateur Photoshoppers to add “Graphic Designer” to their resume. Clients already think computers do all the work in design.

PhotoSketch is an emerging technology that has been creating a buzz lately. It allows users to sketch a scene that they require, which is then created in photo format using images from the web. The application is able to do this thanks to an array of various algorithms that selects appropriate images, discards unwanted ones and then blends them together to produce a composite, much like an artist would using Photoshop.

We present a system that composes a realistic picture from a simple freehand sketch annotated with text labels. The composed picture is generated by seamlessly stitching several photographs in agreement with the sketch and text labels; these are found by searching the Internet. Although online image search generates many inappropriate results, our system is able to automatically select suitable photographs to generate a high quality composition, using a filtering scheme to exclude undesirable images. We also provide a novel image blending algorithm to allow seamless image composition. Each blending result is given a numeric score, allowing us to find an optimal combination of discovered images. Experimental results show the method is very successful; we also evaluate our system using the results from two user studies.

Visit the site (if available) here. Read the paper here.

Twenty-five year old motion designer Magnus Engsfors produced this short video to illustrate the moment of total mental collapse due to very difficult personal circumstances. A great choice of soundtrack- Twenty Minutes by edIT.

It was shot with one Canon Eos 5D and a single external ProFoto flash while I was hanging from two ropes stretched across the scene. Then some heavy masking and retouching in Photoshop before the layers were lined up in After Effects to add camera movement and particles