holy smokes cs4!

i went to a mini cs4 seminar at work today. they showed us a lot of the great new features involved with the software including this sweet little feature:

say I want to make the image above a bit smaller in width, but I liked the length of the photo. I don't want to get rid of anything, so I want to keep the boat, sunset and birds. How do I do this? Hmm...I could Transform the photo (below) but, then I end up with an anorexic sun and a really short boat.



Instead, I use Edit > Content Aware Scale. I end up with the image below where everything stays in proportion.



Of course I could not wait to test this out at home. The first image I chose was a random photo with a little boy I know. I realized that photoshop needs to be able to tell the background from the "main" parts of the image. It ended up making poor Luke look like a wrinkled old man.

It's still a really great new tool. Probably my favorite from the day. I'll try to remember to post more of these as I test them out.