CS4 Content Aware Scale....poor results?

I have big hopes (and more than a few jobs) that will benefit from this new feature, but after several attempts, I am left frustrated. The demos look amazing, but after trying it on small (1 meg), medium & large (150 meg) files I am left wondering if this will actually be as useful as first imagined.
In a nutshell, the post-stretched images are lousy, with horrible stair-stepping visible at even 25% screen magnification (the stepping definitely would be visible in print). The aliasing I am seeing are clumpy, stretched, jpeggy-looking artifacts that are apparent in any area of even slight contrast.
Unless I have chosen the wrong random test images (???) or have missed something I should be doing, I am really disappointed.
Before I go off too much, I am wondering if anyone else has done much testing or noodling around enough to pass along your opinion.
I am seeing the behavior when stretching either horizontally, OR vertically, and the stepping is apparent at almost any amount of stretching (no need to exaggerate by stretching to 200%)
Any opinions or thoughts welcomed.

No demo in use here. I purchased CS4 at the inflated UK prices as soon as it was announced and agree that this is disappointing to the point that I really hope we are doing something wrong. Surely Adobe wouldn't release something this bad and promote it as a key development in CS4?
I realised that there might be some quality issues with really large increases but I wasn't expecting it to completely destroy a file where the size was being decreased. On areas with grass I see strange areas which are completely blurred and then the same weird shearing effect that you have mentioned that could almost look like strange shards of glass.

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  • Content aware scale

    Hello,
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    The image i want to scale is 1600x1093px and i would like to resize it to 960x379px for a banner but if i do it the white outlines of the circles get all messed up. I tried a couple of methods described on youtube but none of them seem to work!
    Is there anyone who could teach me how to scale it the right way?
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    If you're willing to not maintain the aspect radio and make it somewhat "squashed looking", you could simply do Image - Image Size..., UNcheck [ ] Constrain Proportions and check [ ] Resample Image, and simply resample it to 960 x 379.
    -Noel

  • CS4: Content Aware scaling never works....

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    so I'm not the only one who has problems with content aware scaling -- but there is no current discussion about it and I'm not sure what to do now.
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  • Photoshop CS5 content-aware scale

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    [signature deleted by host]

  • CS4 Lasso Tool and Content Aware Fill

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