From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Increasing canvas size - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Increasing canvas size

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- [Instructor] One of the lesser known features when using the crop tool is its ability to add canvas area around your image and also fill that canvas. So let's tap C to select the crop tool and just use the right mouse to reset the tool. Now, when you first drag out your crop marquee, I just want to mention that you can't actually add canvas around the image area. It will stop at the image bounds, but you can release your cursor and then you can drag out farther than the image area. Alright, so let's go ahead and add some canvas here. I also want to straighten the image. So I'll position my cursor outside of the crop marquee and just click and drag to rotate it. Alright, now we can fill this with a solid color. In fact, the background color, because I was working with a background, if I set this to background, just picks up the background color so we see the white all the way around. Now if I uncheck delete crops, pixels, then I can fill that area with transparency. But in this case, I want to fill it with actual content. I want Photoshop to expand this photograph for me. There are two different options for this, generative expand and content-aware fill. Let's try content-aware fill first. I'll go ahead and apply that. So content-aware fill uses computer-generated content-aware information based on the areas to expand it, and it gives you one result. And let's take a look. So it looks really good over here and across the top, it looks good over here, although I see some repeating patterns, a few repeating patterns here. And then there are just some areas that it looks like it just didn't quite know what to do with. So that's great, it got us like 80% of the way there. I could then use some retouching tools like maybe the clone stamp or the healing brush in order to fill those areas in. And we'll discuss the healing and retouching tools later in this course. But it's not always perfect, but it does a very good job, gives us a good headstart. So let me just undo that, Cmd + Z or Ctrl + Z on Windows, and click in the image area again to add my crop marquee, and then I'll just hold down the option key to drag out from the center. And let's just rotate that a wee bit in order to straighten it. Okay, this time I'm going to select generative expand, and apply that. So generative expand uses AI to fabricate completely new pixels to fill the area and it does need connectivity to the Cloud because it is sending up a thumbnail so that it can figure out how to fill those areas. It's going to give us three different variations on the properties panel, and we can click through those three different options. If we don't like any of the options or want it to generate more, we can just click on the generate button, but I really like this third option, let's try this second again, it looks good, but if I like the third one better, I'll probably just delete this. And then let's compare one and two. And, you know, maybe I like the first one better so let's delete this. And the only reason that I'm deleting the variation, I mean you don't have to, but it will keep the file size down. And you'll notice in the layers panel, I now have two layers. So if I was going to save this and I wanted to save both layers, then I would want to save this as either a PSD or a TIFF file. And we'll talk more about layers in the next chapter. For now, I'm going to go to the tree roots and just switch to the move tool to hide the crop marquee. If you need the canvas size to be a specific size, then we'll want to use the canvas size dialogue. I'm going to convert the background into a layer and then choose image and canvas size. So here I can change the units of measurement, I'll move to inches, and let's say I just wanted to make the canvas 15 inches by 10 inches. Now you'll notice there are no options to fill that content. That's why I converted the background into a layer so that here it would just add transparency around it. So you can't use content aware, no generative fill in here, but you can expand the canvas to a specific amount. In fact, you can also use the relative amount. So let's say for example, I just want to add a 1 inch border on the top left and right of the image and in a 2 inch border at the bottom, well I would add those inches up. So I would want to add a total of 2 inches, one on each side and then 3 inches for the height. Now I can choose to anchor this anywhere I want, the default's in the center, but if I wanted to put it at the top or the bottom, I could certainly do that, for now, I'll just add it to the center, click okay, use Cmd + 0 to zoom out to fit in screen, and then I could just use the move tool in order to reposition this as needed. So there we go, in order to add canvas to an image in a freeform manner where you can automatically fill the canvas using either content-aware fill or generative fill, you can use the crop tool. Or if you just want to add, say, transparency around a canvas and you need that canvas to be a specific size, then use the image size command.

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