How to Use Content Aware Scaling in Adobe Photoshop CS4 (Lynda.Com)

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Now, for what has to be one of the most jaw dropping new feature to be added to Photoshop in years, Content-aware scaling. This is a highly automated feature, 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 to 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 is going to happen all automatically thanks to a single command.

All right, so here I am on the bridge, I am 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 am 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 canvass size command, and let us go ahead and convert this image to an 8”x8”² 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 am going to reduce the width of the image, and watch this, see I was telling you that dingy, it is 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 is hard to identify that word is easy to see that the boats are still in great shape. We do not want 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 these in a single operation if you like, like so, but if you do you are going to start wrecking havoc in certain parts of the image. For example, I am going ahead and zoom in to the bottom of this image, and you can see how this wave pattern is really getting distorted, and it is almost as if we are seeing the image from a d9fferent perspective at this point. Like we are looking straight down at the water, and then we are seeing it at an angel up here, and we definitely do not want those kinds of misalignments.

So I am going to zoom back out, and what I suggest you do in this case is approach the image in two operations, in two passes. So I will scale it quite a bit horizontally, and then just a little bit vertically, and then I will press the enter key, or the return key on the Mac in order to complete the operation. And then once it is done, I would 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 am going to go up 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 are still some distortion in the wave patterns I could have taken in a 3 or 4 passes instead if I wanted to avoid that, but we are not harming the boats, before, after. It is absolutely stunning.

All right, let us go and close this image, take a look at a different image. Let us see what kind of problems we might run into. Here is a woman that is 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 a

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