New patching feature for Photoshop CS5

If you thought Photoshop CS4’s Content Aware Scaling was like magic, then one of the new features that Adobe is cooking up for Photoshop CS5 will seem like pure witchcraft. 

This feature is based on a “randomized correspondence algorithm” and something about “structural image editing” that can “quickly find approximate nearest neighbor matches between image patches.”  To me, it looks and sounds like the Healing Patch tool and Photoshop CS4’s Content Aware Scaling on steroids.  And crack.  It will be interesting to see what the final flavor of this feature ends up looking like in Photoshop CS5, which is expected to come out April-ish 2010.

For those that want to geek out on the underlying algorithm of seam carving/content-aware scaling, here you go: