Hay Bales With and Without Telephone Poles

So how great is Photoshops Content-Aware fill feature? (Edit -> Fill -> Content-Aware).  The two images above are identical, except for the use of Content-Aware on the right image.  Notice the three telephone poles in the left image.  On the right image they have magically disappeared.  Total time less than 1 minute.

I took the above image somewhere in the Tuscan countryside.  My wife was driving and pulled over to the side of the road and told me to get out and shoot this scenic vista.  I told her the telephone poles would ruin the image but she insisted.  Once I started working with the images I was very impressed with the way Photoshop makes things “go away”.

Some might say that it is cheating to delete such major parts of an image.  Obviously I disagree.  At the last competition at the Northern Virginia Photographic Society the judge commented numerous times that the photographer should have deleted some distracting item in their image.  I guess I am not alone.

I ended up with a very nice panorama after stitching together several images from this spot.  That is a story for the next post.