Content Aware Fill not working if part of layer has no pixels

[Ocean 11]

I have a layer that is 70% pixels, 30% no pixels.

The Content Aware command is grayed out.

If I select the pixels on the layer, the Content Aware Tool opens, but tells me there are no pixels it can work with.

Obviously a bug.

I have to create a white layer, merge the layer with just 70% pixel content, and have then the whole layer with pixels, and then Content aware fill works.

This makes no sense, as I want to fill the zero pixel areas from the pixel areas.

But it looks like Content Aware cannot do that for some reason.

For the Adobe developers, this would be an area of improvement, as such tasks come up quite regularly.

[Ocean 11]

Update:

The trick didn't work.

The image is a snow landscape with some sky and snow missing and I wanted it to be created.

Content Aware works forever and then has exactly zero results - no pixels added or altered, just grinding along and failing.

Content Aware total fail.

[Ocean 11]

I can't edit the post - no edit buttons, so I have to stack them.

I was able to finally do the content aware, but it put the fills on a separate layer and I had to find out where it was, and then merge with the original layer. Very weird.

[Trevor.Dennis]

https://forums.adobe.com/people/Ocean+11  wrote

I was able to finally do the content aware, but it put the fills on a separate layer and I had to find out where it was, and then merge with the original layer. Very weird.

That's normal for the new improved CAF.  I creates a new layer with the 'fill' immediately about the layer you are editing.  This allows you  to further control and fine tune using masks and gradients.   Johan mentioned a mask.  I did not see you mentioning any masks, but if there were layer masks involved, then that could obviously affect the result.

If it is a real issue, and not due to errant workflow, then I suspect it will be one of the High Sierra issues.

Known issues - Running Photoshop CC on macOS 10.13 High Sierra

[JohanElzenga]

For the new CAF with dialog, you decide yourself whether or not the fill will be on the current layer or on a new layer.

[Trevor.Dennis]

It's working fine here.

Are you using the Fill > Content Aware, or Edit > Content Aware?

What operating system?

It might help if you show us a screen shot.  Just paste it straight into the post.

[Ocean 11]

I was working from the edit menu.

Looks like we have two kinds of "Content Aware Fill", that are called the same name, but are in different menus and do different things.

One is Content Aware Fill and is in the edit menu.

One is Content Aware Fill and is in the fill menu.

One could of course call different things differently, and if they are related, put them into the same menu.

But that would be submitting to logic.

I'm on Mac OS High Sierra in Photoshop 20.0.4

[JohanElzenga]

They do the same thing. The only difference is that content-aware fill option in the fill menu does not give you a dialog where you can tweak how the fill is done, and the new content-aware fill from the edit menu does have that. Content-aware fill needs adjacent pixels to work with, so if you select an empty part that this surrounded by no pixels or very few pixels it won't work. A screenshot may indeed help to determine why things go wrong.

[Ocean 11]

It was an image 70% covered by pixels, 30% transparent, and I wanted to fill the transparent part via Content Aware Fill.

So there were many pixels available, but it looked like Content Aware Fill needs pixels to change, and cannot fill transparent space with pixels.

So the term "fill" isn't accurate, it's more a content aware transform (and it needs pixels to transform in a content-aware mode)

Except that I have a bug here - but this is how it's working and not working  on my machine.

[JohanElzenga]

Content-aware fill should fill a transparency with pixels just fine. However, if your 30% transparent pixels are like that because of a mask, then the new pixels will also be 30% transparent, because the mask is doing that. And when you have locked the transparency for the layer, then content-aware fill won't work.

[JohanElzenga]

BTW, maybe you are selecting the pixels based on their transparency? In that case the semi-transparent areas will only be 30% selected, and so content-aware fill can also only fill them with 30% transparent pixels. That might create an error, I never tried that. Select the semi-transparent area with the lasso toll for example, and then try again. Now content-aware fill should work and fill with 100% opaque pixels.

[Ocean 11]

Actually with 30% I meant that on 30% of the image there were no pixels at all.

I wanted to cover that area with pixels, using the 70% of the area that had pixels so I'd end up with a layer 100% covered with pixels.

It was a snow landscape I used as a dropped-in background, a landscape oriented image dropped into a portrait oriented image.

[Norman Sanders]

Sorry, but I have to ask, assuming you made a Selection of the transparent pixels.

Do you have the "Lock: Lock transparent pixels" engaged?