From the course: Photoshop CC 2017 One-on-One: Advanced

"Uncropping" a photo by expanding the canvas - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop CC 2017 One-on-One: Advanced

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"Uncropping" a photo by expanding the canvas

- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll show you how to uncrop an image inside Photoshop. So the idea is this, I shot this photograph of my sons atop a pyramid in Mexico, and it's very unlikely we're going back there anytime soon, and this was the best image I captured, but it's got a couple of problems. The minor problem is that it's crooked. It's declining slightly down and to the right. The major problem is that I committed the photographic sin of cutting my youngest son's foot off which is not something any father should do. So we're ultimately going to straighten this photograph, of course, but we're also going to reinstate Sam's foot along with a bunch of other foreground details. Finally, we're going to extend the photograph to measure 13 by 19 inches, so that we can print it out as a small poster. The first step is to expand the canvas independently of the size of the image itself which is something that I'm calling uncropping. As with standard cropping, you uncrop using the crop tool which you can get, by the way, by pressing the C key. The first thing I want you to do is go up to the options bar and turn off delete cropped pixels. We definitely don't want to lose any real data, and then I'm just going to drag the right side of the image over, and I'm looking. See that head's up display right there next to my cursor? I'm looking for a width value ultimately of 5,484 which I am not achieving at this zoom level, so we'll take care of that in a moment. Then, I'm going to go ahead and increase the height of the image a little bit here at the top and then quite a bit down here at the bottom until I see, not quite that much, until I see a height value of 4,320. As you can see here I've nailed it, so 4,320 pixels is what we're looking at for the height, and these are just values that I came up with through trial and error. Next what you want to do is press the Enter key, or the Return key on a Mac, in order to apply that crop. Now, let's get it exactly right by going up to the image menu and choosing the canvas size command which has a keyboard shortcut of Control + Alt + C or Command + Option + C on a Mac. It is, by the way, another cropping tool inside Photoshop, so unlike image size which lets you change the number of pixels inside of an image, canvas size doesn't add or subtract pixels. It merely changes the size of the canvas around the image itself. I'm going to go ahead and choose the command, and notice that I'm working in pixels, very important, and the relative check box is turned off. I'll go ahead and select this left-hand anchor point here. I'm going to change the width value to 5,484 like so. A height of 4,320 is just fine. At which point, I'll click OK. Now here's where you're probably going to see an alert message, and it's extremely misleading. Notice that Photoshop is not equivocating here. It's saying some clipping will occur, so it's pretty emphatic, and by clipping it means clipping away pixels, so essentially permanently cropping the image. This is only true if you have a flat background inside the layers panel. If you're working with layers, independent layers, as we are, then no clipping will ever occur. Canvas size does not effect layers inside of an image, so you can, with total cavalier, go ahead and click the proceed button knowing that everything is going to work out just fine. In fact, I'll go ahead and switch to the move tool which you can get by pressing the V key, so I can demonstrate that we do have extra image to work with right here. All right, now I might go ahead and move the image up a little bit, so we have just a little bit of head room. We definitely need quite a bit of foot room right there. Oh and by the way, we need to straighten this image as well. Normally you'd probably do that while you are cropping the image. I just forgot because, after all, the crop tool offers its own straighten tool right here. I just happen to know though that it's exactly a degree off. So what I'm going to do instead is go up to the edit menu and choose the free transform command, or you can press Control + T or Command + T on the Mac. Normally I would apply this to a smart object so that it was a nondestructive modification, but I'm very confidant one degree is going to do us, and there's some later stuff we're going to pull off here that is not compatible with smart objects. So I'm just going to go up here to the options bar and change this rotate value to one degree. Actually, it's negative one degree. Then I'll press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac, a couple of times to apply that change. If you have any doubts about whether you got it right, you can use the rectangular marquee tool to just trace along the horizon there and make sure that it's nice and straight. All right we do have a little bit of a problem however with the bottom-left corner of this image which is now exposing a checker board wedge. I don't want that, so I'll go ahead and switch back to my move tool which again I can get by pressing the V key, and you just want to drag that guy over ever so slightly, like so, and a little bit down. We need to make sure that we do have some head room there at the top, and so I might nudge it up a little bit. Right about there looks good to me. Finally, I'll go ahead and rename this new layer boys. That friends is how you uncrop an image to give yourself more room to work here inside Photoshop.

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