Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [167]
To use this feature, you will need an image that's on a normal layer (not a Background layer). Next, you need to go to the Edit menu and choose ‘Content-Aware Scale’ (or use the shortcut). You can then drag the handles that appear on the bounding box for the selected layer to scale the image, making it narrower/wider, or shorter/taller. The preview then updates to show you the outcome of the scale adjustment and you can use the Options bar to access some of the extra features discussed here such as the Protect menu options.
1.
Before applying any kind of ‘content-aware scaling’ you need to double-click the Background layer, or create a new merged copy layer. You can then add extra canvas to the image using either of the methods that were shown on the previous page. For example, you could use the Canvas Size dialog to establish a new canvas size, or simply drag with the crop tool beyond the boundaries of the image. You don't have to do this before applying a content-aware scale adjustment. You could of course always choose Image Reveal All after applying the adjustment to reveal the expanded canvas contents.
2.
This shows what the photograph looked like after I had used the Edit Content-Aware Scale command to stretch the image width-ways. You'll notice how the penguins had not been stretched, but instead had been moved further apart, and you will also notice how the left side of the image had been stretched most of all.
Amount slider
After you have applied a content-aware scale adjustment to a photograph (and before you click OK to apply it), you can use the Amount slider to determine the amount of content-aware scaling that is applied to the layer. If you set this to zero, no special scaling is applied and the image will be stretched as if you had applied a normal transform. You will note that I left the slider setting to 100% in all the examples shown here, in order to demonstrate the full effect of the content- aware scaling.
3.
This shows what happened when I used the Content-Aware Scale command to make the photograph taller. Whenever you scale an image using this method, you have to watch carefully for the point where important parts of the picture start to show jagged edges, or critical areas of the photo (such as the penguins) show signs they are being stretched. When this happens, you'll need to ease off and consider scaling the image in stages. In this example I stretched the photo upwards halfway, clicked OK, and then applied a second scaling to achieve the final content-aware scaled image shown here.
How to protect skin tones
1.
In this example I wanted to show how you can help protect people's faces from being squashed or stretched as you scale an image.
2.
In general, you will find that the content-aware scale feature does a pretty good job of distinguishing and preserving the important areas of a photograph and tends to scale the less busy areas of a photograph first, such as a sky, or in this case the mottled backdrop. However, if you click on the Protect Skin Tones button (circled), this will usually ensure that faces in a photograph remain protected by the scaling adjustments. As you can see here, I was able to stretch this picture horizontally so that the couple in this photograph were moved across to the right. I stretched the image quite a bit, but without distorting the faces.
How to remove objects from a scene
1.
The content-aware scale feature can also be used as a tool to selectively remove objects from a scene. The results won't always be completely flawless, but it can still work pretty well where you wish to squash an image tighter and remove certain elements as you do so. For the first step, I hit the key to switch to Quick Mask mode (see Chapter 9) and painted on the image to outline the bits that I wished to remove. Remember, white protects and black indicates the areas to remove.
2.
Next, I reselected