JUST FOR FUN90 DIGITAL CAMERA^ OCTOBER 2019 http://www.digitalcameraworld.com
Change the relationship
between different parts
ȒǔژƏɀǝȒɎɯǣɎǝ ̈ǝȒɎȒɀǝȒȵټɀ
Content-Aware tools
Recompose
your photos
I
t’s often only when you review your
pictures in the cold light of day that
you realise you could have made some
different choices that may have given
a better composition. The ‘fix’ might
have been as simple as getting the lens a bit closer
to a subject to make it more dominant in the frame,
or changing the camera position with a few steps
to the left or right to alter the way the foreground
works with the background.
Luckily, Photoshop gives you a second bite at the
composition cherry, as you can use its tools to resize
and reposition components of a scene. In the main,
these methods are fairly sophisticated, but the little-
known Content-Aware tools are a gem. They make
this kind of image manipulation dead easy!
We’ll start with Content-Aware Move. Open a picture
in Photoshop CC, then select the tool. It’s grouped with
the Healing Brush tools in the Essentials workspace,
but has its own place in the Toolbox if you’re using the
Photography workspace. Draw loosely around the item,
then drag it into the position you want. To make it bigger
or smaller, press Ctrl/Cmd+T and drag the handles
around the bounding box before pressing Return. The
tool will do its best to fill in the place where it used
to be, so check this area to see if you have a natural-
looking result. You may need to do a few simple
repairs with the Clone Stamp Tool or Healing Brush.^1
Content-Aware Scale allows you to reformat the
composition of an image without losing the core details.
This means that if you have a horizontal pic, but want
to turn it into a square-format image without cropping
out the very details that make it work, you can! To
use this tool, you first have to have either a floating,
editable layer or a selection in place, so press
Ctrl/Cmd+A to select the whole image.
Go to Edit > Content-Aware Scale and a bounding box
will appear. This works like Free Transform, so you have
to hold Shift to break free of the proportional scale; but
when you drag the handles, the core components with
fine detail will maintain their size and shape, whereas
the low-detail areas will be compressed or expanded,
depending on which way you go. Press Return when
you’re happy, crop off the excess, and you’ll have
a freshly recomposed image!^21
2
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