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Now for what has to be the most jaw- dropping new feature to be added to
Photoshop in years, Content Aware Scaling. This is a highly automated feature.
I'm not going to suggest for a second that it always works. It doesn't.
Sometimes it fails miserably. But it works often enough and when it works,
it works amazingly well. Now you have to see it to truly appreciate
it, but here is the idea. Content Aware Scaling is capable of scaling just the
low detail information inside of an image while keeping the actual real identifiable
objects intact. So for example, we are going to take this horizontal
image right here and convert it into a vertical image while keeping each one
of the boats intact. We are even going to take this dingy and scoot it a little
bit under these boats and it's going to happen all automatically. Thanks
to the single command. All right, so here I'm in the Bridge, I'm
going to double-click on this image to open it up inside Photoshop, going to press
Shift+Tab to bring up my panels. Now Content Aware Scaling is ultimately a
transformation function just like regular scaling and rotation and transformation
functions work best on independent layers.
So I'm going to go ahead and double- click on the Background layer and I will
call this new layer 'boats' and click the OK button. Now I want to give myself
some headroom, so I will go up to the Image menu and I will choose the Canvas
Size command. Now let's go ahead and convert this image to an 8x8 inch square
like so and click OK and now I have got some room to work at the top here.
Now for the command itself, I will go to the Edit menu and choose Content Aware Scale
and I'm going to reduce the width of the image and watch this. See? I was
I telling you that dingy, it's going to scoot underneath that other boat right
there. Watch it go and look how far we can compress this image before we start
messing up the boats. I mean these guys are going to run into each other here.
The land mass and the background is getting pretty squished, the foreground water
is getting squished as well, but it's hard to identify that where it's easy to
see that the boats are still in great shape. We don't what to go quite that far
with the modification, so I will take it a little wider and then I will go
ahead and scale the height too. Now you can do all of this in a single operation
if you like, like so. But if you do you are going to start reeking havoc
in certain parts of the image. For example, I'm going to go ahead and zoom-in
to the bottom of this image and you can see how this wave pattern is really getting
distorted. It's almost as if we are seeing the image from a different perspective
at this point, like we are looking straight down at the water here and
then we are seeing it at an angle up here and we definitely don't want those
kinds of misalignment. So I'm going to zoom back out and what I would
suggest you do in this case is approach the image in two operations and two
passes. So I will scale it quite a bit horizontally and then just a little bit
vertically, then I will press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac in
order to complete the operation and then once it's done, I will go back up to
the Edit menu, choose Content Aware Scale again and go ahead and finish off the
effect like so and then press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to
apply. Finally, I'm going to go up to the Image menu and I will choose the Trim
command and I will trim away my transparent pixels, click OK and there is
my vertically formatted image. So here is the difference, folks. This is
before and this is after. Now there is still some distortion in the
wave patterns. I could have taken it in three or four passes instead if I want
to avoid that, but we aren't harming the boats. Before, after. It's absolutely
stunning. All right, let's go and close this image, take a look at a different
image. Let's see what kind of problems we might run into.
Here is this woman that's jumping in the sky. I want to change her from a
horizontal format to a vertical format as well and the funny thing is that I
just recently used this image as an example of what Photoshop CS3 could not do;
now it becomes an example of what Photoshop CS4 can do. I have already
converted this woman to an independent layer so I'm going to Shift+Tab away
those panels. Then I will go up to the Image menu and choose Canvas Size and
let's go ahead and give her a height of 6 inches, so once again she is square
and now I will go to the Edit menu and choose Content Aware Scale and I will
make her narrower and noticed that she holds up pretty well, as I make this
image narrower. I have to go pretty far before she starts getting stunted.
So right about here, she is still normal. She hasn't been harmed, but as soon
as I make her taller, notice that we do run into a bit of a problem. I think
that's fairly recognizable as being a mess. And it's a big mess and this is
pretty typical for Content Aware Scaling. When it goes wrong, it goes very, very wrong.
Fortunately, we have some protection up here in the Options bar. We have got
this little icon here that allows us to protect skin tones and by skin tones we
mean actual exposed skin, warm stuff inside of the image. So if I turn it on,
noticed that everything but her pants is now protected. I'm going to zoom-out
and if I scale her all the way like so, then I'm going to expand her pants and
we don't want that. So I will go ahead and drag this top handle
down a little bit, until we get some normal sized pants and then I will press
the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac and I will follow it up with the second
application of Content Aware Scale and drag that top handle all the way
up and she remains completely intact, which is fantastic. Let's go ahead
and trim away those transparent pixels once again and now I'll zoom- in. This
is the after version of the image, this is the before version. So it's absolutely
amazing that we can get away with this kind of modification. We have
stretched her pants just a little bit but looks like they are being buoyed up
because, you know, she is in air. So looks fine. Oh my goodness.
All right, one last example. I'm going to switch back to the Bridge here.
Let's go down to this image. Now this image is fairly cluttered with a lot of
detailed information. So this is the kind of photograph that gives Content
Aware Scale some problems. I'm going to go ahead and double click on it in
order to open it up inside of Photoshop. Once again, I have already established
that image on its own independent layer and I'm not going to try to scale this
one taller, because we don't have any headroom to work with. We have nothing to
scale, but I am going to make it narrower. So I will go up to the Edit menu and
I will choose Content Aware Scale and I will drag this fairly far over to the
right. Now you can see, that even though I have my Protect Skin Tones option on,
I'm ruining my child's arm, right here. This is quite bad I think, so I
will go ahead and turn this option off and see if it fairs any better and it doesn't.
Now we have a much more disturbing problem. So what's the solution? Well, I
will go ahead and escape out for a moment by pressing the Escape key of course.
Let's check out the channels. I have gone ahead and created a Mask channel down
here and wherever we see white, that is potential protection and wherever we
see black that is open to modification. So we can see if I turn on the RGB
composite at the same time, we can see that I'm allowing this area to scale
right here and everything else is protected. All right, so let's go ahead and turn the
mask off, click on RGB in order to make it active once again. Shift+Tab away
those panels and I will go up to the Edit menu and I will choose Content Aware
Scale and I will make this image narrower just like I did before, but this
time I will go up to the Protect option and I will change it from None to Mask.
You have to have an alpha channel prepared in advance to take advantage
of this option. I do of course and I will go ahead and set it and now you
can see both this platform in the background and Sammy are relatively protected.
Sammy being my son there. And if I drag this farther part, you can see this
area right here, right in this area, this unprotected area is the area that's getting
scaled. So I can't scale this one too far but I still
can make a fair difference, much more than I could in the past, thanks
to of course, Content Aware Scale. I will go ahead and press the Enter key or
the Return key on the Mac, go up to the Image menu, choose the Trim command, go ahead
and get rid of those transparent pixels and there is my final photograph, my
final scaled photograph, with all of the action happening in this little region
here and you can barely tell anything occurred. Content Aware Scaling,
it's a latest miracle of imaging technology here inside Photoshop CS4.