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Getting The Elephant Out Of The Room


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Here at the Platformic blog it's a pretty loose forum.   While I don't really think that anyone is going to post a blog about their cats (well, maybe Eric might ...) we post about a range of stuff that might be of interest to a client of a CMS or someone looking to work on websites and although Platformic does not provide graphic design services we do work with a host of people who might be interested in graphics and for certain who at some times might use Photoshop so I wanted to share something that I learned today which blew me away (and I have been using Photoshop for 15 years now!)

Of note toward the point of my arrival at this knowledge, I recently upgraded my Adobe and I did a few searches with the term "Adobe" in them and now probably 30% of the banners on any website that I visit are for Adobe - I have to say this bothers me a bit.  It's a discussion for a completely different blog but let's say I know and understand that they don't know that I as a person by name (Mark Underhill) are the person who was looking for Adobe a month ago but it still bothers me that I am bombed with ads because I performed a search.  Anyhow ... onto the better part.

So, I kept seeing all of the adobe banners and they keep mentioning "NEW - Content Aware Fill" ... promoting the hell out of this new feature and finally I thin - "Hey, I should at least look and see what that is".   So, I do some YouTubing and I find out that the "Content Aware Fill" is supposed to be something like an amazing Clone tool that lets you for instance remove a road from a picture of a dessert with one click or remove a tree from a golf course - again - with one click.

If you have used PS for any time you know that you can work to replace things like this but it takes a bit of nuance and sometimes it's really difficult to get a good result and can take hours for really meticulous good job.  I had to test it out.

Well, I thought what's a good way to use this - how about to perform the age old task of getting that elephant out of the room?   so I took a picture with an elephant and with literal maybe 4 clicks of the mouse (selected a square around the elephant, selected fill->content aware fill, hit the button)

Boom!  NO ELEPHANT!  check it out.  Of course it's not 100% perfect but with a little tiny bit of clean up it would be.   Yes, if you look closely you will see the tree looks a little funky but again, this exercise took maybe 30 second as opposed to a clone job which for me (and I know I'm not that good at this) but it would take me an hour.

I have to say I have always been impressed with Adobe products but this was quite an "Oh Wow" moment for me and I thought I would share - maybe you might need to get someone "out of the picture" ....   Well, maybe when you are editing your website content and your image  just has a little extra that you want removed quickly


well, now it's as easy as this.....  re-explained with actual steps after the images

truck.jpg

notruck.jpg


Step 1: Use any selection tool to select the area you want to remove.   My first try was seen above was just a regular rectangle around the big elephant.

Step 2: Open the Edit->Fill menu.

Step 3: Select "content aware fill" if it isn't pre-selected.

Step 4: Hit the button and let the machine process.

That's all!    I did try a few other selection tools like the lasso after the fact with similar results - seems like you might give it a different selection if the first one doesn't work as well.

Below are just a few of our clients sites, built using the power of Platformic. Please click the thumbnails below for full size photos.
Here at the Platformic blog it's a pretty loose forum. While I don't really think that anyone is going to post a blog about their cats (well, maybe Eric might ...) we post about a range of stuff that might be of interest to a client of a CMS or someone looking to work on websites and although Platformic does not provide graphic design services we do work with a host of people who might be interested in graphics and for certain who at some times might use Photoshop so I wanted to share something that I learned today which blew me away (and I have been using Photoshop for 15 years now!)
Google recently announced that it has acquired a social RSS service called Postrank which is a huge indication of their commitment to their social strategy. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that this move is an indicator that social media and services continue to have a very big impact on the web as we know it today. The future will surely continue down the social road.

So what does Postrank do anyway? Here's a quote straight form their web site on the subject:

"Our platform tracks where and how users engage, and what they pay attention to — in real-time. PostRank social engagement data measures actual user activity, the most accurate indicator of the relevance and influence of a site, story, or author."
As sure as the sun will rise in the morning, your site users are going to end up hitting a 404 error page at some point or another. But what you provide them when they hit that pages can actually tell a lot about your site, and can help turn your what is technically a fail for the user into a win, if done properly.

By definition (remember when definition was pulled from encyclopedia rather than wikipedia? I guess I am dating myself somewhat here), a 404 page is:

"The 404 or Not Found error message is a HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with the server, but the server could not find what was requested. 404 errors should not be confused with "server not found" or similar errors, in which a connection to the destination server could not be made at all. A 404 error indicates that the requested resource may be available again in the future."