Comparing Content Aware Fill Implementations
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Photography
Tags:
Pixelmator Pro
Photoshop
Affinity Photo 2
I recently got into 360 degree photography. One issue, especially with drone shots, is that there are some blind spots which cause the final image to have holes. There are several ways to fix those issues. In this article I will compare the different content aware implementations of these popular photo editing solutions:
- Adobe Photoshop (I used the content aware fill method and not the new content aware will as that on is harder to time and much much slower and seems to result in worse output in my experience)
- Affinity Photo
- Pixelmator Pro
Source Data
Here you can find the source images used for my testing. The images are the top cube of different merged panoramas (they are also show in the cover image). I choose 3 examples represent the most common skys I usually encounter:
- a fully/moslty blue sky
- a blue sky with grayish clouds
- a blue sky and puffy white clouds
Evaluation Method
My approach on evaluating the different approaches was to execute each of the following steps for each programm and sample inputs:
- Open sample image in application
- Select the transparent hole
- Increase selection slightly to cover some of the sky (unfortunately there is no uniform way to adjust the selection across the different programs)
- Run content aware fill
- Export results as 3000px by 3000px at 70% Jpeg
Results
Timing Results
For the timing results I measure the wall clock time between the to moment I started the fill operation to the moment the operation had been completed and the hole was filled on the screen. Here are the measured results in seconds:
| Adobe Photoshop | Affinity Photo 2 | Pixelmator Pro | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| moslty blue | 6.93s | 16.23s | 9.95s | |
| grayish clouds | 7.03s | 28.4s | 13.25s | |
| puffy clouds | 6.28 | 38.18s | 9.45s |
As can be seen from those numbers Adobe Photshop is the clear winner when it comes to performance. Not only is faster than the other programs it is also consistent across different images. Pixelmator Pro is not too bad either with only a few seconds behind the Photoshop. Affinity Photo 2 is clearly playing in a different league (but not in a good way). With taking 30 seconds and more for some of the images this is clearly disruptive and a major disadvantage.
Output - Mostly Blue Sky
Adobe Photoshop
Affinity Photo 2
Pixelmator Pro
Output - Gray Cloudy Sky
Adobe Photoshop
Affinity Photo 2
Pixelmator Pro
Output - Gray Cloudy Sky
Adobe Photoshop
Affinity Photo 2
Pixelmator Pro
Summary
All of the tested images/programs did a decent job with filling in the holes, although none is really perfect out of the box and some more corrections need to be applied after the initial filling. Each program created their own quirky artifacts and different runs of the content aware fill will generate different results. For some tricky images you probably want to test each program as one program can generate complete garbage when another creates an almost perfect solution. But Generally speaking it seems that Adobe Photoshop and Pixelmator Pro generate the goods at a reasonable speed while Affinity Photo 2 is trailing behind both of them.