Hi, welcome back to the photoshoptrainingchannel.com.
I'm Jesus Ramirez.
In this video, I'm going to show you how to resize an image without stretching it in Photoshop.
I'm going to show you two different examples, one with photography and another one with
graphic design, that are going to give you a very good understanding of how this technique works.
There's really not that much to it, so why don't we jump right into the tutorial?
This is the first document that I'm going to work with.
It contains a layer of a car, and you can see that there is some transparency here on
the side.
And if you press Ctrl T, Command T to transform that layer and scale it, you're obviously
going to scale all the pixels uniformly.
All the pixels are going to scale at the same time.
And if you wanted to do this, but only affect the background, or the areas that are not
important, then Photoshop has a great tool for that.
I'm going to press the Escape key, and I'm going to go into Edit, Content Over Scale.
This command with apply a scale, but try to protect important visual areas in the image.
Areas with people, areas with animals, and things like that.
So let me show you how that works.
I'm going to click-and-drag.
And now you'll notice that the image is not really scaling proportionately like it was before.
Now we can see that the pixels in the mountain are collapsing.
Unfortunately, in this image, so is the car.
But that's okay, that's not a problem.
We can actually fix this in Photoshop.
So I'm going to press the Escape key and show you what you can do.
The content over scale allows you to protect areas of an image, and you can actually protect
them very, very easily.
You don't have to do a lot of work.
What you need to do is go into the Properties panel, with the Layer Select.
And make sure that your layer is unlocked.
And then go into the Properties panel and scroll down.
And click on Select Subject, so that you can use Adobe Sensei, which is Photoshop's artificial
intelligence, to find the main subject of the image and do a selection around it.
The selection doesn't need to be perfect, as we can see in this case.
We don't have the shadows or tires selected.
That's totally okay.
What I'm going to do now is simply save the selection.
And I'm going to go into Select, Save Selection.
Give your selection any name that you want.
I'm going to call my selection Car.
And press OK.
Then I'm going to press Ctrl D on Windows, Command D on the Mac to deselect.
And I'm going to go into Edit, Content Over Scale once again.
But this time, I'm going to go under protect.
And notice that we have a None button.
We're not protecting anything.
But if I click on the dropdown, you'll see now that there is a Car option.
So I'll select Car, because that's what I call my selection.
So whatever you call your selection, that's what you will see in that dropdown.
And what you can do now is scale the image, and you'll notice now that you'll affect all
the other pixels in the image, but not the car.
So now you can make your photo fit anywhere that you like.
I should also mention that we do have a skintone protection button.
So if you click on that button that you see there, you'll protect skintone.
So you'll try to protect people.
So it's a hit and miss with that button, so try it if you have a photo of a person.
If it doesn't work then do the technique that I just showed you to protect the person, and
then you can scale your image.
Now, let me show you the second example, which is going to be more of a graphic design example.
And this is something that I came up with.
Now that I do a lot of teaching, I also do a lot of writing.
And I create articles and I need to do screenshots.
And sometimes I need to fit the screenshot of a UI element into a specific space for
an article, or a website or something like that.
And it doesn't always work.
So let me show you a quick and fast way of resizing UI elements using this technique
so that they can fit in the areas that you're trying to place 'em in.
So this is the document that I'm going to use.
And I just have this layer.
And I'm trying to place that layer in that space.
And what I used to do before was simply make a selection with the rectangular marquee tool,
then select this bottom part.
Press the V key on the keyboard to select the move tool, move that up.
And then I would deselect.
And with the move tool I would try to place that into position so that my graphic will
fit in place.
But with the technique that I'm about to show you, you don't need to do any of that.
All you need to do is have your layer selected, and you can go into Edit, Content Over Scale,
and you can click-and-drag, and place your UI element into position.
And click-and-drag, and notice how Photoshop keeps all the pixels that are important, but
it just contracts the pixels that don't have any important information.
That's a really, really, cool technique.
I should also mention that with this technique, you can work with a selection active.
Let me show you what I mean by that.
So I'm going to go back into what we were working with originally.
And if I want to make sure that none of these pixels on top get affected, what I can do
is just simply select the pixels on the bottom.
Go into Edit, Content Over Scale, and click-and-drag up from the bottom.
And then I can just click on the check mark to commit the changes.
Then I can press Ctrl D, Command D on the Mac to deselect.
And now I have a piece that will fit in that space.
So you can use a selection if you like.
Let me know down in the comments below what you thought about this technique.
If you enjoyed it, go ahead and give me a like now.
Also, if you want to learn more about Content Aware, I do have a playlist that show you
all the different tools in Photoshop that use Content-Aware.
I have a video for each one.
The videos are recorded in an older version of Photoshop, but that's okay, it's still
relevant to newer versions.
I'll place a link to that playlist below in the description.
Also, I made a one minute version of this tutorial on TikTok.
If you want to check it out, I'll place a link to it below in the description.
But if you haven't already, make sure that you subscribe to the Photoshop Training Channel,
and that you click on that notification button, so that you get notified whenever I publish
a new tutorial.
Thank you so much for watching.
I look forward to you again in the next Photoshop tutorial.