The Holy Crop! blog has just posted a new video tutorial (the blog’s first!) on using Adobe Photoshop CS5’s Content-aware Fill feature to do a little anti-cropping.
When we crop we remove pixels. Anti-cropping adds pixels back for composition’s sake. Consider the example before and after images shown below. The first image is an out-of-camera capture. The bird is hitting the left edge and violating the rule of space. There is no space into which the bird can move. The second image is our anti-cropped version with a much-improved composition. Watch the video at the end of the article to see a demo on how this was accomplished in just a few seconds.
The bird leaps out of frame. How can we save this crop?
Image Save! Thanks to Content-aware fill.
Watch the three minute tutorial video embedded below or on the Fleeting Glimpse Youtube Channel to see the step-by-step.
Various content-aware features in PS CS4 and CS5 have changed the compositional game when it comes to cropping. I will be showing some more content-aware cropping tricks in future articles.
Rikk Flohr © 2010
Great idea- I was just wondering if this was possible!
Barb,
This would be a good article for the camera council blog to feature.
Realizing the Blog’s purpose was to show the advantage of the new Content aware fill tool in CS5. But I would have been more likely to have done a rough selection of the hawk, mirrored it and then worked to blend it into the image. The final results would be the hawk arriving instead of it leaving
I considered it, Gene. Any birder would have called me on it as the hawk is on a power down-beat which means it is lifting-not feathering for landing. But you are right, the composition might be better. That is a job for a CS4 and beyond tool: Auto-blend Layers… Perhaps I will continue the video?
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