Adobe don’t only produce excellent software, they are also masters at marketing their products. The release of each new version is preceeded by the calculated leaking of info on new features to create the kind of buzz that makes it hard to resist gear lust.

With the build up to the release of Photoshop CS5 the feature that has sparked the most interest is the much touted ‘content aware fill’. Like a clone brush on steroids its potential to quickly and easily fix images by intelligently removing unwanted elements has both excited and worried photographers.

While the thought of saving hours of painstaking labour in post production is obviously appealing the obvious flip side is the worry that the same tool will make it ridiculously easy for the unscrupulous to remove watermarks on images they wish to steal.

Here’s the ‘sneak peek’ video released by Adobe in the run up to release;  it is easy to see how the technology can be turned against its intended users!

Well Photoshop CS5 is now available (you can get a free trial version here) so we can now try this double edged sword out for ourselves. So far the reality seems to be somewhere between the hype and the fear in that the tool isn’t always quite the magic solution it was suggested/hoped/feared it would be.

As it works by sampling surrounding pixels its effectiveness seems to vary according to the complexity of the image being worked on. So the images it works brilliantly on are the ones that a competent user of existing tools could handle already. Many watermarks, such as the one I use on my images and the Alamy crosshair are already relatively easy to remove from many images, especially if the intended use is only a low resolution web use where the picture wont be subjected to close scrutiny.

The entire image overlay style of watermark, as used by agefotostock for instance, isn’t going to succumb to the power of content aware fill as easily! Obviously this style of watermark isn’t acceptable to many to many people wishing to showcase their work but it does illustrate that the content aware fill doesn’t entirely render watermarks redundant as an image theft prevention measure. To an extent I feel watermarks have for sometime already been as much about branding and providing contact details for legitimate image users interested in licensing a photo as they are about preventing photo pilfering.

So in essence content aware fill is another tool in your image editing tool box and may be good enough to make you pause and reflect on your own current approach to the use of watermarks and how you publish your work online generally. Is it worth upgrading for? Take photoshop CS5 for a test drive and decide for yourself!

For Adobe’s current specials on Photoshop and CS5 click here. Or click here for free alternatives to Photoshop.