How to Extend Background Using Content Aware Scale in Photoshop

in this video you'll learn how to extend your image background in photoshop hello everyone and welcome back to another photoshop tutorial so in this tutorial i'm going to show you how to use the content aware scale feature in photoshop and this feature is particularly useful when you have a vertical portrait image like the one we have today and you want to extend the background to match a horizontal canvas let's say you are creating a cover image and you want the background to match the whole canvas so before i show you how to extend the background i want you to keep in mind that this feature may not work on a busy background it will work best when you have a simpler and repeatable background okay before we extend the background we need to first increase our canvas size so we're gonna click on c to get to the crop tool and then you're gonna hold alt or option to extend the canvas vertically and if your aspect ratio is locked you can click on the clear button and then you'll be able to extend the canvas freely ok i'm going to accept the changes and now to extend the background you're going to go to edit then content to wear scale so if you are in a newer version of photoshop you will see that it will start extending the image on both sides so you need to hold shift to extend the canvas horizontally and also hold alt to extend on both sides so what will happen here is photoshop will detect the subject and it will only extend the background so as you can see we were able to extend the background to match the canvas and the subject is still intact so this tool worked very well on this image but in some cases photoshop may not detect your subject perfectly and it will scale alongside the background so if that happens to you let me show you how you can protect the subject from scaling alongside with the background so in the next example let's try and extend the background let's go to edit and then content aware scale again again i'm going to hold alt and shift to extend horizontally and as you can see photoshop is doing a pretty good job up until this point but if i go any further you will see that it will start affecting the subject especially on her left hand right here so if i extend the background any further now the subject is affected and it's not looking good so i'm gonna undo the last step so up until this point the subject is looking good so i'm going to accept the changes and now to protect the subject we need to tell photoshop what area you need to protect so i'm going to take the lasso tool and i'm going to make a selection around this subject like so and then what you need to do is go to channels and then click on this layer mask icon to create a new channel now click on ctrl d to deselect and as you can see our new channel is called alpha one now we can go back to layers and then go to content aware scale again and now before we scale the background we need to tell photoshop to protect that area which is the channel that we created before that is called alpha one so select that and now when you extend the background you will see that photoshop is now protecting the subject no matter how much we scale the background so i'm going to accept the changes and as you can see now we have the background matching the whole canvas you may not stretch your image too much like i did today as you can see the effect of the stretching is visible especially here on the clouds but this is a great tool to use to quickly extend your background and then you can modify it further so that's how to use the content-aware scale feature in photoshop i hope you find this tutorial helpful if you want to learn how to extend a busier background let me know that in the comments down below other than that make sure to like this video and subscribe so you don't miss out on new tutorials thank you guys so much for watching and i'll see you in the next tutorial [Music] you

Channel: RetutStudio

Views: 367,305

Keywords: RetutStudio, Photoshop, extend background in photoshop, extend background, stretch background in photoshop

Id: wjfCmCs-I8g

Length: 4min 54sec (294 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2021