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How to Reshape Images Without Distorting in Photoshop Content Aware Scale

Hello, my friends and welcome to my most favorite Photoshop feature of all time. We want to make this bigger without distort. Look at it magically grows bigger so we're going to resize things without distorting them. And if things distort okay, like our poor man here and I'll show you how to protect the men. So handsome surfer dude doesn't get stretched. We're going to go to some more advanced uses as well, but we just want more surf because we need to add some text or stretch it for a banner ad. Maybe a double page spread all using the magical content aware scale lets get going in Photoshop. Alright, so we have got exercise files from a new folder. This one is oh five cropping aligning distorting. If you can open up all of the content aware scale 127, there's quite mhm There's quite a little tips and tricks we can learn with content aware scale First tip is, I can't see one. Okay, so this little double chevron here, you can click on this and it shows you everything that's open. I've g...

ot a content aware scale one and let's say that we've got this image, but we just need it to be square for some unknown reason instagram, we just need to be taller because there needs to be text in here. You need to stretch it this way because it needs to be kind of the right size for maybe a double page spread for a magazine. So first thing we need to do is we need to unlock the background. So double click background, give it a name. Don't tell anybody that I never do. But you should. Next thing I want to do is like generate some space up here. You could use image canvas size. Okay. And they just, you can type in a size that square. I just like to grab the crop tool, grab it, hold it and just drag it to the size I want. I want to be out there. Return now. The magic tool. Okay, so it's under edit. That's this one here. Content aware scale unlike transformed transformed is going to do this. That's not what we want. We want this magic one here content aware scale. Get ready city. Holy moly just invented more background Cool. Huh returned when you're finished and that is the magic tool that's been there for a long time. And if you are like a lot of advanced users like I know they'll be shocking or on your face. I love it. And I kind of picked an easy one but in all honesty it kind of works like that without any help. Only about 30% of the time But 30% of the time is good rather than The clone tool stamp madness. We all have to do right to try and fix it all up but don't worry the other 70%. There are tricks to kind of make it work for that as well. Let's look at content aware scale to this one is just the same just a little one for you to practice with. Let's do it together first thing, let's rename the background layer. I just double click on the word background. I got my crop tool clicking once I'm holding down the old key and dragging the corners and just goes from all sides. Just to give myself like how far can this go out here? Okay, now I'm gonna use my edit content aware scale. Now you'll see I've got a shortcut here that's not there by default, I added it, I went to keyboard shortcuts and I made my own one because I use it so much and so much. I give it like the world's most shortcut. I know it anyway, it's my shortcut shortcut. Leave me alone. What we're gonna do now is, yeah, just see how far this goes. Look at this. This one is particularly good as well. It works really well when there's small, unique high contrast images amongst kind of more generic stuff where I find something like this really useful is if you've ever done like I do a lot of advertising banners, I've got a course on html five banner ad making okay. And this is perfect for it because you get these kind of weird leaderboards, leaderboards are a pain right, because they are that shape. But look what we can do with content aware scale or the skyscrapers are the long and thin guys along here. Okay. Maybe not resizing like that. Maybe you just invent more background this way. Cool. Let's look at another use case and this one here cool image. I just need, I need space over here to add text and if I let's name our layer, grab my crop tool, I want to put some space in over here please. But if I try and just fill it with a color, there's this kind of like subtle gradient in the background. I'll show you a little trick so if I wanted to fill it, okay I can make a new layer, put it underneath. I'm gonna grab my eyedropper tool. I can click on this color and then I want to fill this layer with it. A cool little trick is holding down the option key on a Mac. The old key on a pc and just hitting your backspace or delete key. The one just next to the plus and it fills with your foreground color handy trick you can see there, it's kind of blended in a couple of parts but not over there. Ah but what if we could use our dan's crazy shortcut, we're still using edit content aware scale and watch this magic and say I want it over here. I'm just going to keep on like using this poor image until I get this giant area for my come by my orange flyer or double page spread and I've got this kind of cool thing spanning across. I'm going to say cool hot loads in this. Of course I love showing people content aware scale but let's say you've used it before and you run into trouble. Let's look at content aware scale for let's look at this handsome man, remember name the background. I'm going to stand out my background a bit and now I want to resize it. We're going to run into a couple of problems or one big problem. Watch this and a man got all stretchy some pretty good job of everything else though. Right? So how do we fix stretchy man basically we just need to protect him so we can select and I'm gonna like the cool thing about it is protecting a person with a selection can be as blunt and as quick as using the rectangle marquee tool and say that but there I want you to be protected. So once you've got a selection, this little tip is a little hard to remember. So you might want to write this one down. So go to select. You save the selection, I'm going to call this one man click OK de select it. Don't need it anymore. So you save your selection. That's the important bit. Now when we go to edit content aware scale there's this option that says protect man and that's just looking at my selection. Now when I drag it out it protects the man pretend cool huh? Now let's look at one that kind of almost works. I feel like I need to show you this because if I end it there you'll be like hey it's not working on my one. So I'm going to go through that same process super quick. Okay I'm just making it bigger. I use my content aware scale so we're going to run into problems with the bottle here. Can you see it just starts getting a bit too tall. You might actually find that that's fine. Who knows how big the bottle is anyway. But you know, so let's say we want to protect that. So what we need to do is do a selection. You can use the quick selection tool, the magic one tool or the lasso tool. Any tool you like. I'm just using the rectangle marquee tool. Remember save the selection, give it a name de select and it's going to work to a degree. Let's watch this a little bit. So it works works works works a lot better than it did before. But eventually it just go it gives up and goes I can't keep doing it can't keep protecting that area. It's better than it was. But there are times where it just won't work. I feel like I need to keep that in the class because sometimes it doesn't work. What you might do in that case is we looked at content aware fill in the last video so I'm just going to kind of settle him here I'm gonna use my content aware scale, which we've already done because the, the side to side worked. Alright. It's this height that didn't. So instead of kind of dragging this up to get the top, I'm going to grab my rectangle marcato, grab all of this and I'm going to say, please go to edit Phil and use content aware fill. It's going to look at the document and try and fill this background de select. And it's done a pretty good job. So kind of a combo deal the stuff we learned in the essentials. Course. Content aware fill plus some of the newest stuff with content aware scale. Now we kind of worked around this one to make it work. They're just images that are too busy to noisy. There's no small part of a more generic background. There's just lots of high contrast areas. So let's have a look at this one and I'll show you sometimes there's no fixing it. Good content aware scale. Mm hmm. It's cool. Like it's pretty amazing what it's done. It's done some interesting things. Okay, so the most generic stuff I found was this coffee cup, this coffee in the middle here. The platelets tried to duplicate that and it's done an okay job, but I wouldn't know where to start with this image and I guess I want you to know that if you need to extend this one. It's tough. It's really cropped in. What I'd probably do is I'd mask out all of these guys separately. Find a new wood background to stick it on. That was bigger than what I had. Then I can separate them all out manually. It would take a lot longer but I can't think of a better way for that one. Let's go to the chevron's and find the last one. The other little tip I want to give you is sometimes say this one here. I need some, I need more waves because I need to put the text for the banner ad that I'm doing so again, I'm going to name the layer, grab my crop tool, gonna make some space up here and if I just use the whole thing which we've been doing up until now, okay, it's fine but it's it's not what I want. It's it's given me more sand and more waves. What I want to do is just use my rectangle marquee tool, drag a box around the stuff you want and then transform just that part. Most people try and do the whole image where you can just do apart. Maybe it's sky because you need a bigger sky for logos and stuff to go into. So just make a selection. I'm going to go to content aware, scale and check out these people down here. That's the cool thing about it is that the people will stay the same. Okay. The waves get bigger. Unbelievable. The waves get a little taller but the people stay fine. It's awesome, Huh? You can tell. I love content aware, scale enough that I gave it the world's worst shortcut. Alright, my friends. Let's get into the next video.