- Now, anytime you want to stretch one portion of an image
independently of another,
you need to work with a rectangular selection outline
that you create using the rectangular marquee tool.
And that's because that way you select entire rows
or columns of pixels at a time.
All right, now I'm going to draw a selection
that goes almost to the top of the rocks right here
on the left-hand side and all the way down
to the transparent region below the photograph.
And so, I want you to see here that I am very close.
The top of the selection is very close to the bottom corner
of this rock formation right here.
I want to make sure that I include this entire thing,
this weed,
but I don't include any of the foliage in the background.
All right, now I'll press control + 0
or command + 0 on the Mac to zoom out.
I do not want to stretch the boy's legs.
So I'm going to de-select them,
again, using the rectangular marquee tool
by pressing and holding the alt key.
So I get a minus sign next to my cursor,
and then I will de-select from over to the left
of Sam's wristband down to the right of Max's toe.
And I'll end up with this effect here.
So I have two rectangular regions of rocks selected.
I don't want to harm the original image.
So, jump this selection to a new layer
by pressing control + alt + J
or command + option + J on the Mac.
And I'll just go ahead and call this layer stretch
and then click okay.
All right, now I need to be able to scroll downward
a little bit like so,
and I'm doing so just using the scroll wheel on my mouse.
If you can't get that to work,
then press control + K or command + K on the Mac
to bring up the preferences dialog box,
switch to tools,
and then go ahead and turn on this guy, overscroll.
And it allows you to scroll any which way you like
regardless of the zoom ratio,
at which point, go ahead and click okay.
All right, now I could go ahead and stretch this layer
using the standard free transform command
located under the edit menu.
In which case I would go ahead and drag this bottom handle.
Unfortunately that scales the image proportionally.
So, as I drag I'll go ahead and press and hold
the shift key like so,
and then I'll drag downward until my height value
comes very close to 150%.
So notice the width value is a 100%,
which is to say,
we're scaling the layer exclusively vertically,
at which point we'll press the enter key
or the return key on the Mac to accept that change.
And then I'll zoom in on these rocks and you can see here
that they are exclusively stretched.
So they're now much taller than they are wide
on a uniform basis, by the way.
So, every rock is stretched
and we have this very pronounced seam right here
between the unstretched pixels and the stretched ones.
And that seam appears over here to the left of Sam as well
Notice this rock, doesn't look right at all.
All right so, I'll go ahead and press control + Z
or command + Z the on the Mac to undo that change
and I'll go ahead and zoom out once again
and scroll down as well.
And this time, instead of using free transform,
I'm going to take advantage of this command,
content aware scale,
which will allow us to stretch the layer
while introducing a little bit of AI.
In other words, Photoshop is going to automatically decide
which details it scales on the fly.
And so I'll go ahead and choose that command.
And again, if I just drag down on this handle,
I scaled the image proportionally,
which doesn't even make sense,
it defies the purpose of this command in the first place.
But then anyway,
I'll go ahead and press and hold the shift key,
as I drag this guy down
and I will once again, drag that handle down
until I have a height value of more or less, 150%
At which point, I'll press the enter key
or the returning key on the Mac to accept that change.
And now I want you to see what we've got.
Not all of the rocks are scaled to 150%.
Some are scaled much less, and some are scaled even more.
And as a result, we have this kind of molten effect
where we have these wave patterns in the rocks,
which obviously is not acceptable.
So, I'm going to press control + Z
or command + Z on the Mac to undo that change.
And I'll go ahead and zoom out a little bit
and I'll return to the edit menu
and once again, choose content aware scale.
And I want you to notice a couple of options over here.
We've got this guy, its job is to protect skin tones.
You can experiment with it if you want.
Doesn't work very well.
Then we have this protect option,
which is going to seem mystifying
cause, it's just going to read none.
For it to read anything else,
you would need an alpha channel.
So, in additional channel in the channels panel,
which would then protect certain details inside the image,
we don't need that however.
We do need this guy right here, the amount value,
which is going to allow us to minimize
some of the distortion.
So, what I'll do,
is I'll go ahead and drag this handle down right here,
the bottom middle handle, that is to say
while pressing the shift key.
So, I go ahead and expand this guy
so that the height value is once again,
in the neighborhood of 150%,
and now you can see once again,
we have that kind of flowing effect there, those wavy rocks,
at which point, I'll go ahead and reduce the amount value
and notice that that brings back some of the structure.
So if I crank it all the way down to 0%,
it's the same as if I was using the free transform command.
We're not introducing any AI at all.
Which is why I'll go ahead and take it up a little bit.
But even at 20%, we ended up getting some waves
and so, I ended up coming up with a value of 12%,
which I found just by pressing the up and down arrow keys
until I got something I liked.
At which point I'll press the enter key
or the return key on the Mac a couple of times
to accept that change.
All right now, because we reduced that value,
we're going to get some seams.
And so what you want to do
is select the spot healing brush tool,
which has a keyboard shortcut of J
and then go up to the options bar
and turn on sample all layers.
And then I'm going to press the right bracket key a few times
in order to expand the size of my cursor.
And I'll just go ahead and paint back and forth
up along this line, like so,
and that should help to get rid of that seam.
All right, we need to do the same thing over here
on the left side of Sam starting right about there,
is where I'm seeing the seam
and then just painting down and what we're looking for,
where the transition between the tiny rocks
and the big rocks is concerned.
We want the little rocks to look like they're overlapping
onto the big ones.
That's going to make the most visual sense anyway,
and then I'll go ahead and paint down like so,
and if you paint out into this region, it's entirely fine.
All right, now press control + 0
or commands + 0 on the Mac in order to center my zoom
and I'll press the M key
to switch back to my rectangular marquee tool.
And that's how you stretch an image detail
while adding a little bit of AI to the equation,
using the content aware scale command.
(upbeat music)