Content-Aware Fill in Photoshop
On 30 April 2010 Adobe began shipping Creative Suite 5 and with it Photoshop CS5, in which a selected object can be removed and the program fills the empty space from its surroundings - the Content-Aware Fill feature. Photoshop CS5 had been announced on 12 April.
Why it matters
Filling a hole, for a decade a problem of research papers, became a button in the most widely used image editor. From then on a machine painting into a photograph was an everyday editing operation rather than a laboratory example, long before generative models.
The 12 April release: the feature "removes any image detail or object, examines the surroundings and seamlessly fills in the space left behind"; Photoshop CS5 cost US$699, Extended US$999. An Adobe vice president says there that the sneak-peek video of the feature had close to 2 million views; these are the company’s words, not a measurement. Neither Adobe release names PatchMatch. Adobe’s John Nack introduced PatchMatch in his blog on 1 June 2009 as the work of Adobe researchers Eli Shechtman and Dan Goldman with Adam Finkelstein and Connelly Barnes of Princeton, and on 24 March 2010, under the sneak-peek video of Content-Aware Fill, answered a reader calling it "just inpainting" with a link to that post. That the feature implements the 2009 method is stated outright by the authors in Communications of the ACM in November 2011; two of the four worked at Adobe. All of these are the maker’s voices. The record makes no claim about the quality of the fill.