hey guys welcome or welcome back thanks so much for joining me today we are gonna go through
how to basically make your background bigger in photoshop
so i am a little bit under the weather at the moment i am currently recording this
from my bed so i'm hoping that this is going to go okay we're on the macbook pro today so
it's a slightly smaller more condensed screen but everything should basically be exactly the same
if your photoshop does not look the same as mine please go ahead and watch the previous
video on how to set up your photoshop workspace to basically look like this and of course if you
haven't already please do go ahead and press the subscribe button and click the bell icon because
why would you not do that that's just a nice thing to do um it would be great to have you on board
so i wanted to work on this image that we've got on the screen right now of bramble i've not done
anything to it apart from lifting the shadows and reducing the highlights because obviously
this was a backlit situation and she is black so there was quite a uh inbalance i would say in
lighting so we're kind of at a point where i'm happy to bring it into photoshop so that is
where we are now bramble is not a perfectly well trained dog she is a client dog and she did a nice
certain wait but getting her mouth closed was a rarity so it was um not one of those situations
where you can get perfect composition we're not far off she's nicely on a third but um let's go
ahead and see where we're at compositionally so if we go into the original ratio we've got the
rule of thirds grid up you could if you wanted to cycle through your crop overlays by pressing
o and go through and just make sure that you're on at the um the right compositional grid for
the image so this is the rule of thirds there so in terms of the composition on this i personally
felt that there was a little bit too much space above um because there wasn't a lot of space below
so what we can just go ahead and do is click and drag our crop and what that does is you see how
that adds space below so that's added a little bit of space there i want to also go ahead and
just add a little bit of space to this side and i think if we were to go from there that would be a
pretty good composition you can use your arrows to just nudge so we've got these empty pixels
down the sides right so there's nothing there there's no image there so if we were to just
sort of lock that in we would have to go ahead and clone all of the extra space
which is just time consuming and boring and look we don't need that in our lives so what you can do
is up at the top here there should be an option for content aware
if you have content aware checked and then locking your crop with your extra space
photoshop will make its best guess at filling those space areas and usually it doesn't do a
bad job especially if you're using small little bits like we have in this particular image
so photoshop there has just added that extra space and we've ended up with a much more pleasing
composition within the image the composition of it now looks great so that is one way to go ahead and
add space okay so i've got open now a slightly more difficult image to work with so this image
is slightly harder again it's another one where composition in camera wasn't 100% perfect but um we
need to add space and in this situation the space needs to be added to the right hand side because
compositionally she's looking for the right and therefore the space makes sense for it to be there
however we have a tree uh the tree is not going to help us in this situation at all um
and actually it probably would look better if the background was the other way round
in terms of having all of this bokeh to the right hand side but it's not the end of the world so
let's use that same method and see what it gives us so this time we're adding a lot of space to one
side taking a little bit off the top and we've got all of these empty pixels here completely empty
let's see how photoshop does at filling that in with this content aware option selected
okay so you can see that we've got this kind of enormous tree here um which isn't kind of
useful really so what we can do is we can undo so let's go back to our original image and at this
stage what i want to do is i want to duplicate that layer so i've got two layers here by
duplicating all i'm doing is pressing command and j if you're on a windows ctrl j so with that done
we unselect delete cropped pixels grab our crop tool once more and go back to that original crop
that we kind of wanted earlier on so something like that i think would be quite nice
her eyes on the third line there close to the cross point enough space on the
left and a lot of space on the right and let's click yes on that and see how photoshop fills
so again same result uh that's fine because we've got a plan b so what i'm going to do
is i'm going to grab this bottom layer layer 0 in this situation and pop that up at the top
then i'm going to do command t to grab my transform and then i'm going to right click and
select flip horizontal what that's done is that's given us the image again but placed over the top
so it's uh kind of giving us some pixels to pick from now what i'm doing is if you see the
tree here and then there's this tree here in this image in this side of the image and then the floor
as you can see the floor is here um what i'm doing is i'm just kind of lining the two up there
so that i can press enter and therefore that will save that transformation in and
then i can go ahead and grab a mask so i'm going to just make sure that layer 0 is selected and
then i'm going to hold down option on my keyboard or alt on a windows and just click the mask layer
which will give us a black mask then i'm going to grab a brush a nice big soft brush on 100% opacity
maybe a little bit smaller than that and i'm just going to go ahead and
paint back over this area here just that area i'm not too concerned about having bramble in
there but you can just brush her back out and this area here is a little bit light so i'm just going
to maybe go 50% uh flip my brush and just bring back a little bit more of that section there
we've got a line of brown here so we want to make sure that's out so this section of the image is
absolutely fine we just have this edge to work on now which is not really going to be a problem so
a nice small brush here dusting into the image and then i'm not sure if you remember but in the last
video we went through how to do straight lines so we just hold down shift after clicking and we
can get a straight line so by doing that we've essentially made our tree a lot thinner and we
could bring back some of this ground area too to just give the track a little bit more shape there
and of course you can kind of go as far as you want to go with something like this
but that's absolutely fine for me because then i can build my edit on top of that
so the before in this situation after we've done our content aware fill looked like this
we've shrunk the tree a little bit and given ourselves a little bit more space
and then we can edit on top of that and yes losing that super bright bit of bokeh
has been a little bit sad you could always bring that back through so the bright bokeh bit is there
trying to remember where it is that nearly there okay so you can just bring through if you wanted
to that bit of bokeh as something to look at and that's just by just using the mask like normal
so that will give you that element of the image back in but the rest of it out and therefore you
end up with a much less distracting image if this video has been useful for you please do remember
to press the subscribe button it would be lovely to have you on board and if you haven't already i
just want to wish you all the best and a happy new year we've got some exciting news um that we're
releasing in the next few days so please do stick around and i'll see you then see you really soon