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New Photoshop CS6 "Content-Aware" Feature Will Destroy My Billable Hours

By Rain Noe - April 30, 2012

in Object Culture

Last month I did a rendering gig for a client that involved blending their design with elements from photos of a competitor's design and dropping the whole thing into a photorealistic environment. Pretty standard stuff, and I always use Photoshop for these types of jobs. Depending on the objects' complexity, the requested environment and the clients' mood, these gigs range in length from the better part of an afternoon to several days, which all adds up to billable hours and me keeping the lights on over here.

I've just discovered Adobe's new Photoshop CS6 has new "content-aware" move and patch tools that are going to greatly reduce the time needed for those types of jobs. Here's how they work:

More on the content-aware move and extend tools after the click...

When I first saw these features I was psyched—then I realized my billable hours will directly plummet as a result. Thanks a lot, Adobe. You guys are a bunch of jerks.

o

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Spiv

12 years ago

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Billable hours? Ew. Always happy to charge by the job: if I get something done in record time I feel like I should get paid more, not less. Keeps me focusing on making new processes and learning new things.

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Chris

12 years ago

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It was a good read until the last "WTF" paragraph. It's called progress, deal with it. You've got choices: one of which is telling your clients you won't use this feature and will continue to bill the previously-estimated hours. Good luck with this! Or, develop new techniques (even if you feel so pissed as to not use Photoshop anymore) -- this is called adding value (your skill, experience) and that's what your customers pay you for.
Or if you feel so inclined, launch a hunger protest to gain national publicity. I'm sure you'll find "many sympathetic" supporters.
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Brett_nyc

12 years ago

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andrew, I was very close to spitting my coffee out. ha
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Andrew

12 years ago

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Congrats, you're the blue collar worker of the digital world. In the future, presidential candidates will promise to bring American Photoshopping jobs back from Adobe.
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Dubya

12 years ago

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Maybe its just me, but the results from these tools as shown seem pretty bad and full of defects. I think this might be good for people who do not have a lot of experience, but I bet pros will still use different methods to get better results.

I also thought it was a little funny that the guy in the first video was just using the track pad, no Wacom, really?
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john

12 years ago

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It leaves that 'halo' effect around objects and they never fully look blended, you still have to be a pro to do do that. More than sufficient for fun photo editing work though. But when you drag objects around remember to scale them appropriately!

It is good and useful but it doesn't seem to be a function that most designers run into everyday. I think it's very useful for photographers and retouchers, but us designers will still be getting by.
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