Whoa! Photoshop is getting creepy

He has kind of a goofy attitude -- saying things like "solving a common problem with panoramas" when he really means "using a panorama as the seed for a fantasy image"....

This is an incredibly awesome feature, but I'm more impressed (and distressed) by the new digital painting tools they're offering. As a digital painter, I'm find myself frustrated with PS's inability to blend "paint" in a way that feels organic, something other art software like ArtRage or Painter accomplished a long time ago. Now they're finally incorporating this into PS and it's made me very happy. I'm less happy about the obvious abuse this feature will encourage. There's a lot of mixed feelings in the digital art community on the overuse of PS filters by amateurs to make their work or a photo look cool. It's not gonna be fun to be an honest painter now and have people claim "oh you just smudged a photo!" if your work is realistic, or even mildly realistic. Smudging is fairly obvious to a well-seasoned PS painter. This new kind of smudging...less so. They'd pass for "from scratch" painting easily.

I suspect this will open up photoshopdisasters to a whole new generation of amusing mistakes.

Taking michael5000's comment in a positive direction, I'd love to see what happens if these tools are applied to a fantasy image to see how it expands out or in. For example, what would it do to an Escher image that was more than just a tessellation?

Further advances in content-aware-infilling-Photoshoppery:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ScWu7pG7r0

GIMP has had this as plugin (Resynthesize) for so long, it is currently broke in the latest version of GIMP. http://www.gimp.org/

"GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages. (more...) "