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Changing Image Aspect Ratio

The reason where this is the first content aware technology that adobe brought into existence actually bought and pulling in the program, and now they're doing content where everything and the benefit for photographers and artists is what if you want to change the aspect ratio specifically the scale of your image, either reducing it down or adding to it. In other words, you want to take a vertical and turn it into a horizontal? Obviously you take a vertical in turn into horst, only you have to recreate information that never existed, right? If you double something, there's double the environment that you need to create well, and of course you could just do a horizontal scale, but you would be if there was a family, they would all become, you know, the michelin men, so you don't want to do that and the same thing with this one if I were to take this and do a traditional scale, uh, come up here and do a regular commander control t I can turn this into a vertical, but those people for som...

e strange reason don't quite look believable. So whether it's subtle where you want to take a eight by ten and turn it into an eleven by fourteen aspect ratio that's a huge practical use of it, you're so close. You don't want to crop something down to fit this different aspect ratio you actually want to change it you don't want to distort the person, the place or thing that's your subject matter but you want to change the aspect ratio without observable distortion that's content aware scale the content where phil let's see we'll just if we can I shouldn't do this I should not do this I shouldn't try and show you guys content were phil for retouching not without trying it first on a particular image you always can your demos especially something with the horizon length like that but we'll just do it just for fun to see because you guys are all now family so that's content aware phil that automatically recreated that line everything that was behind the people and how did I get to it? I just simply did a shift delete and that brings up all your fill options so certainly for the painting idea where you may need to get rid of something kind of rough you don't it doesn't need to be accurate it actually oftentimes could do amazingly great jobs at re creating content that did not exist before and every time you do it it's slightly different so there you see that was a slightly different fix than the other one so that's another tip for you shift a lead content where every time you do it it uses a slightly different algorithm and some are better than others, so that's content aware phil, you have content where hell you're healing brush now has a content were option, but the topic here of being able to change the aspect ratio of a photograph is very, very interesting. And in this case, as a default setting, how you find it is you go edit content aware scale found over here, and you're edit menu right by free, transform, and it does certain things quite well, so we'll use this one the thing what it normally does is it looks what's known for looks for what's known as high frequency information, so, uh, features of a face that can actually pick out and say, okay, I'm not going to distort that. So when you get into content or scale in something like this, where it's not finding a face it's going to be very hard for it to figure out, what do you want to distort and what you not want to distort? So for really significant control of content or scale, which is, of course, all of you are only interested in really controlled situations. What you're going to want to do is come up here and create, and we'll come up here and we'll add a little feather to it you want to create what's known as an alfa channel to protect the areas that you don't want distorted this's the person this is the portrait this's the couple this's thie antique car this is whatever you want whatever you do don't change this you have permission to change everything else in the image you don't have permission to change this you make a selection and you go to the channels palate and you're gonna make a alfa channel groups thrown but make an alfa channel okay that looks like this then you can de selected because now when you go back to your layers and you're going to go and well let's duplicate that layers we could see before and after edit content or scale you can just use it is this and often times it does a great job where it's you're goingto look and it's going to try and keep what it considers high frequency information from not scaling those people really aren't scaling yet it's still not scaling it's still doing a pretty darn good job now it's starting to scale them because I'm getting greedy it's going dude really you want me tio half the information okay and you don't want any distortion or you wanted to extend that image and add information without distorting the couple but in this case we do have something that's not typical it's just a black silhouette it really can't see that is high frequency and that's where coming up here at the top of the options bar which we've already seen during this week are so powerful for you to understand the options for all the tools you have won this little thie men's room sign the men's room side is for protecting skin tones so that's nice if you're doing a portrait want to slightly change the aspect ratio click on that it says okay anything with skin tone I'm not going to distort so it's kind of an auto mask kind of thing in this case I'm going to have created that alfa channel it finds it here and says oh okay so now I got it so now what I do when I'm scaling this file no matter what I am not going to scale that couple so here I've got something where I've done it already over fifty percent it's a long panorama looking down the beach I've still have a smooth line of the ocean going back to the distance I still have the point I have my beautiful sunset I have the nun non distorted couple I can say go ahead that works for me actually does excuse me a final rendering and I was able to radically change what is a panorama into in this case a vertical or square format so the one thing you do have to remember is one the little men's room signing the options bar if you do have a portrait it's great way normally you're not going to get this greedy right it's goingto you're goingto have limited in terms of what you're trying to do or you're going to use the alfa channel in the alfa channel is probably the main way that you'll protect a portion of the image because you want to make sure that there's no chance that it's going toe you know distort something so you just simply select the area little soft edge feathered last so I just did a feather of ten and and there we have it so there is are you no before and there's are after and there is again no distortion on that couple and a radical radical distortion of the image and, um completely usable so again, if all you're doing is an eight by ten to eleven by fourteen or that kind of aspect ratio no problem you want to get really freaky and go one way or the other you absolutely can okay, yes question set the parameters like eight by ten eleven by fourteen I mean, how do you know you've gotten where you want to be? Good question, um what you would do and I have my content where image um here's another one won't do here and this brings up that question to answer your question commander control our brings up here ruler in photo shop you can right click on that ruler and change it to inches this presupposes that you've set the pixels per inch that you want for your print out whatever it is three hundred to twenty five or whatever set that an image size here so in terms of image size, you can set it to whatever you like. This is two hundred if I wanted that to be three hundred or two twenty five as I mentioned is another two twenty five turn off free sampling so it doesn't actually change the dimensions of anything. But now when you switch that over to from percent to say inches is going to tell you how big you can print that out so let's say this is now six by two by four it's a low rest file and I want that to be exactly the height this for I need that to be a two and a half inches wide it's a little hang tag for ah label so I can come up here and come up here and actually, you know what I wanted to be I want to be exactly three and a quarter inches wide can I uh, three and a quarter inches wide? I'm gonna come back here lis reset that and so I have a ruler appeared answer, question and what you can do is this rulers in photo shop if you click and drag on the ruler, you can actually drag out a reference guideline. Okay, from both the top and the bottom. So I have my file. I know that I've dragged it out to three and a quarter inches. Three and three eighths inches. I've got my golfers here. I want to make it the this little wonderful hang tag. So I come over here to this image. I'm going to do a command tea, not command treaty because command tea would do a regular transform right where I've got skinny golfers. What I want to do is go edit content or scale. I'm going to see if this has enough information enough high frequency for it to go like this. Okay, this is where the money gets thrown up on stage because that's freaky cool hit enter and what it did is it just separated out brought in all this information between each one of the golfers brought them all together, and it also automatically set type for you it's an amazing filter. This is ah demo russell brown, the head creative director for adobe, came up with so I love this one, so that is the content or skilled this case I did not need either the protect skin tone or the alfa channel, it is a very smart filter, but by giving you that alfa channel, you saw that that's the most control you'll have, so that's content where scale. It's. Actually, you know, absolutely amazing. If we undo that a little bit, you'll also see that the content where scale, if I needed just two golfers, they're edit content or scale. I could even come over here and ad space. Now that cover of the magazine, which I could crop, is just one golfer isolated by themselves, with no other golfers in the picture. With no distortion on the golfer adds or subtracts slices. Dices makes hundreds of julian potatoes in just seconds. Now, how much would you pay for it?