A very simple tip I read about today - for use when photographing indoors in a makeshift sorta studio or just any sort of posed photos in your house. Cover any visible electric outlets and switch plates with a piece of paper (especially if the walls are already white or close to white). I know its pretty simple (usually) to clone out something like an outlet. And it wont be perfect - but it will be significantly easier to just clean up the edges of the paper - especially if there is any shadow falling or gradient of lighting across the wall - which would otherwise make a simple clone job cumbersome. Also, depending on how shallow your DOF is - the paper might just render as completely invisible (or otherwise much more natural piece of your background) rather than a glaringly obvious blurry looking outlet. Simple tip - to help get it 'more right' in the camera, to spend less time at the computer.
Just as easy to use the patch tool, make a selection around the outlet and use another area to patch... Then the healing brush to clean it up and clone if necessary... I do it all the time this way....
Yeah like I said - its USUALLY pretty simple to make something that small go away. But if for example you had a shadow falling across it - or the light was falling in a gradient across the wall - it would just become more work to get it right. If you did this tip - you could probably just heal away the edges and be done with it. Most of all though - I think it becomes most useful when shooting in shorter DOF - where the paper will likely disappear, rather than having two little blurry electric outlet eyeballs in the background. It would take all of 5 seconds to do it - and if it saved 30 seconds on the computer (times the number of photos you have to edit) - I'm doing it.
That's when you just hit it again, lol... It works well with textures and not so well with flat surfaces....
Talking about Content Aware Fill, check this out !! It's called Content Aware Move, in PScs6, quite impressive !!
