My only experience with Photoshop is through memes; is Content Aware Fill the same as Content Aware Scaling? I thought the former tried to guess what was "behind" something you removed, while the latter just moves the existing pixels around by guessing which ones need to stay together when you resize something.
See the PatchMatch research project and associated papers[1] for more detail. They are different tools in presentation and implementation within Photoshop but are based on similar concepts of randomized correspondence.
”We propose a simple image operator, we term seam-carving, that can change the size of an image by gracefully carving-out OR INSERTING pixels in different parts of the image”
That paper (which I think is the paper introducing the seam carving technique) also has examples of widening pictures.
