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Hi, Mike McRuiz here, and welcome once again to Advanced Photoshop.
This time around we're going to explore really
simple, but amazing technique called
Content Aware Scale.. And with Content Aware Scale
you you might think of it as well,
like a the free transform tool
on steroids. Now with Content Aware Scale
you can scale
the background have an image without affecting
the subject, and this allows the user to adjust an image to the exact size
perhaps for particular publication
requirement, For example maybe we've got a picture that is
four by six inches and when its gonna be published
is got to be published at 4 by 5 inches
and you don't want to stretch the picture because that would distort it.
But you can use Content Aware Fill
to make the picture fit into the document window
without distorting the subject matter, It's easier illustrated then described so
let's just go ahead and get started right now.
I'm gonna open up a picture downloaded from blackboard
called prom dresses. okay so get the file opened:
and I'm gonna turn my rulers were pressing control command R
and you can see that the image is 12 inches wide
and 8 inches tall. Let's say that this is gonna be published in a magazine
and we only have space for an eight by ten inch picture.
okay if I were to use the free transform tool
and bring that
in towards 10 inches, look what it does to the picture. It looks
absolutely horrible.
So we're gonna use this new technique that is going to
allow us to scale a picture without
cropping it and without distorting the figure.
Let's start by copying our layer
I just press Command J and I'm gonna turn off
layer zero. Now going to go to my edit
menu. You can choose Content Aware Scale
and there's a keyboard shortcut have alternate shift control C,
or option shift command C
on the Macintosh. And we do that we see that there
is a bounding box appears around it
with handles much like what you would see with
the free transform tool. I'm gonna click on this
side handle right here a drag that to the right
you see what Photoshop is doing
is detecting what is the content
the picture the subjects and differentiates that
from the background. And so is a drag this
in you see that the figures are not being distorted
but that background is being compressed. I'll drag the other handle,
bring that in. Nnow if I continue to bring it in
more and more Photoshop hasnothing else to do but actually compress the content
to the picture
and then it becomes distorted and looks rather
rather obnoxious. But up to this point it's all protected pretty well.
okay so let'*** escape not commit that transformation
and then I'm gonna choose that again edit Content Aware Scale
and at this time I'm going to
select this little figure appear at the top
when I click on this little figure that's gonna help it to detect a
human figure in the picture, so that when I compressed image now
it does its very best to keep from
compressing the the
the figures. Sp it detects
skin tones and tries to protect those
and it does a pretty good job up until we get to about nine inches or so that
then it has no resort except to actually compress the picture.
But if we don't do too much we might be able to actually get away with that so
here
we've cut down from an
8 by 12 image down to
an 8 by 9 each image without suffering any significant distortion
in the picture.
I'm gonna break them back down to the ten-inches'
jsut so there's no distortion. I'll press
return or enter to commit to those changes.
now there's another technique we can use which use
we're we create and save a selection
and then we have Content Aware Scale
protect that selected area, which gives you even more control.
Let me show you what I mean. Let's go back to our Layers panel
and I'm going to go ahead and hide zero copy.
and let's take our original image
and copy that again, and turned
it on. Okay so what I'm going to do
is make a selection I'm I will use the polygonal lasso tool
because gives me little more control and let's set our feathering option up here
to 10 pixels. I'm just going to
draw selection around the girl on the left hand side she is the most important
part of this image, so this is the area that I want to protect
above all others.
I'm giving myself a little bit of leeway there, mind you have
feather in his 10 pixels, I'm feathering it so I have a nice blended
transition when we go to
use the Content Aware scale.
Okay so I've got my selection and I'm gonna save the selection
I'll choose select and save selection
call it left girl
and deselect, make certain you deselect.
Now let's go to our Edit menu then choose
Content Aware Scale. And
up here on the Options bar where it says protect none,
we're gonna quick that drop down menu we're going to choose our save selection
which is called
left girl.
and now I'm going to drag the
right Center handle to the left
and you can see that she is protected.
We're sacrificing the other pixels but she is protected until Photoshop has no
other course
but to compress her.Because you saved that selection
I can pull this in I can probably squeeze this in
quite a bit by to bring it down to nine it looks pretty bad
but I can bring it into about
9 and half inches there or nine and three quarters
without suffering in the serious
defects. Now you see that the girl, the
three girls on the right are being compressed
but our protected figure is not.
just press return
or enter and
there is our finished result. So this is a technique, though it doesn't work in
every situation
it can be very helpful, especially if you're in the publishing business.
And again I'm just gonna open up my
panels here, we can toggle these on and off. There's before,
there's after, back to
agains, if you're transforming an image
you never ever want to
stretch or compress that picture
with the free transform tool because it looks awful.
really really really bad
so don't do that, use the
Content Aware Fill option if it works in that situation or crop it
to the appropriate size. okay that's a quick and easy one
and will move onto our
our next topic