In a previous post, I showed how to use Adobe Photoshop CS4’s amazing Content-Aware Scale feature.

In this tip, I will show you how to save a photograph that needs more area in the frame to provide a better composition.

Let me start by showing you the original photograph, then walk through the steps to get a more pleasing composition.

The original photo:

As one can see, the photograph is not well framed.  Too much space on the right and not enough on the left.  Normally, one would add canvas to the left, then clone the area to achieve a better balance.  But, given the magic of Content-Aware Scale, one can achieve the same result without cloning and do it in seconds.

First step, we add canvas to the left.  Easy to do.  Just select the photograph with the crop tool, then pull the square selection tool to the left to add more canvas, the hit the enter key.  It looks like this:

In our next step we use the rectangular selection tool to select the area of the photograph just to the left of the long feather at the bottom left of the bird.  Once the area is selected that we want to expand, we go to Edit, Content-Aware Scale – the selection now has square selections and we grab the center left one and pull the selection to the left to fill the expanded canvas, then hit the enter key.

Once the new image has been expanded to the left, it is time to crop the photograph from the right to bring balance to the image for a good composition.  The final image looks like this:

Compare with the original:

So the steps are:

1. Open the image in Adobe Photoshop CS4 (this will not work in prior versions of Photoshop).

2. Select the crop tool and then position the tool over the entire image, then drag the right selection square to the left to expand the canvas, then hit the enter key.

3. Now that the canvas has been expanded to the left, use the marque tool to select just the portion of the image that one wants to expand, the go to Edit and select “Content-Aware Scale” – selection squares appear, grab and pull the left square to stretch the canvas to fill the expanded canvas, then hit the enter key.

4.  You’re done.

A special thanks to E.J. Peiker for explaining, in simple terms, how to do this.