The Photoshop Productivity Series: Automating Photoshop

Patch Tool

Although the Patch tool isn’t new, the addition of the Content-Aware option is relatively new. This is a real game-changer because now we can put the results of Content-Aware technology onto a blank layer and select the pixels to use. This is particularly useful when Content-Aware Fill has problems with things like repeating patterns.

Here’s the result of using Content-Aware Fill on a photo with a pattern that needs to be matched. Not bad, but it took a few tries to get the pattern to match up—and even then part of the fill didn’t really work well (Figures 2.33–2.34).

Figure 2.33 Using Content-Aware Fille to remove the debris at right. ...