Adobe Creative Suite CS4 - Design Premium

Content Aware Scaling

This is very clever technology that has been paraded by the various pundits from within and without Adobe. As so often happens with the whiz bang show-stoppers, the reality is slightly less impressive. Our first attempt was to take Doug Gordon's shot, an image we needed to stretch across a double-page spread, as an album backdrop. The image was nicely extended, leaving the middle figures in proportion but the edge figures were cranked all over the place – not good then! We tried a different tack on Judy Horgan's shot of the mother and children. Here we performed a content-aware scaling on selections either side of the group, in two bites. This worked well. Overall then this feature is not quite as good as the featured examples in the various shows, but it remains very clever and will certainly be of great use if, for example, you have to extend an image to fit a page format (something we often have to do on our cover shots). There is a good QuickTime movie on the subject by Russell Brown. In it he shortens a VW Camper to Smartcar length and keeps the wheels round – very amusing as you might expect from Russell.

Image Merge

We took image sets from Paul McMullin (which readers have seen before) for these trials. The image merge facility has been improving steadily since it was first introduced several years ago. This process really tests a computer system to the limit so we pulled out the stopwatch and stitched a number of file sets. To create the 78MB file of the new Liverpool Echo Arena took just 1m20s. All eight processors, plus 10.4GB of RAM were brought to bear by the operating system. You will note that the program did not cope with the distortion in the pan.

Next we stitched an image of the Liverpool waterfront which has a particularly tricky right-hand end. The 10 images were stitched in about 3 minutes to create a file of 700MB (that's about 2 metres wide). Photoshop and AutoCAD Stitcher both failed to place the right-hand image. Stitcher in fact crashed in the attempt at manual stitching.

LEFT TOP: We failed to persuade Photoshop to correct the distorion in this image of the new Liverpool Echo Arena.
ABOVE: The photomerge facility made a good job of all but the extreme right-hand image of this Liverpool waterfront panorama. The unplaced
image was conveniently stacked up on the top left by the program. The quality of the remainder was excellent.
RIGHT TOP: Stretching Dog Gordon's image produced distortion in the outer portions of the image.
RIGHT LOWER: Taking two bites at Judy Horgan's image extended the sides out very neatly.

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