Welcome back to another very exciting tutorial here at the PhotoshopTrainingChannel.com.
My name is Jesus Ramirez and you can find me on Instagram @JRfromPTC.
In this video, you will learn how to use Photoshop’s Content-Aware Scale.
This video is going to be part of my Content-Aware series on my YouTube channel.
I already have several other videos on how to use the Content-Aware technology.
They’re grouped together in a YouTube playlist.
There’s a link to it down below in the description.
But anyway, in this video we’re going to focus solely on the Content-Aware Scale which
allows you to resize an image without changing important visual content such as people, buildings,
and other important items in the image.
Normal scaling affects all pixels uniformly, while Content-Aware Scale affects mostly pixels
in areas that don’t have important visual content.
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you two examples of how to use the Content-Aware
Scale.
We’ll use a photograph, and I’ll also show you one of the techniques that I use
when creating screenshots of user interfaces.
Okay, let’s get started.
So we’re going to work with this image of the Sydney harbour.
So we have the Sydney Opera House.
And if you notice, this image is quite wide.
It is actually wider than the canvas, as you can see there.
And sometimes you maybe working with images that you may need to fit in a required space.
It maybe a constriction based on the blog post that you’re creating.
Maybe it’s a social media profile or it could even be a magazine layout or anything
of the sort.
The point is, is that you’re trying to fit an image into a predefined area or aspect
ratio.
In this case, these layers are way too wide for the space that we have.
You can, of course, press Ctrl T/ Command T to transform and scale the image in.
But if you do that you will of course, stretch the pixels and you will distort buildings.
I’m going to press the escape key to cancel that and, obviously, that is not the best
way to do it.
But in Photoshop we can use the Content-Aware Scale to help us with this problem.
So I’m going to go into Edit-Content-Aware Scale or you can use the keyboard shortcut
Alt+ Shift+ Ctrl C, that’s Option + Shift/Command C on the Mac.
And watch what happens when I scale now.
I’m going to click and drag from the left, and notice how I’m not really distorting
the image.
Instead, Photoshop is collapsing the pixels that don’t have important content.
So we did not distort the Sydney Opera House or a lot of the buildings here on the left
hand side.
When you’re done, you can just press the check mark.
And now this image fits then the predefined space.
I’m going to press Ctrl+ Alt+ Z/ Command Option Z on the Mac to undo.
And I’m going to show you a couple of the features that this tool has.
So I’m going to go back into Edit- Content-Aware Scale and notice the Options bar, we got a
few options.
First, on the left-hand side, we have the reference point.
Notice currently that middle box is selected, that means that the reference point is right
in the center.
That’s default.
This is where the image is going to scale from once we start clicking and dragging on
the handles.
I can click on these boxes and notice that the point moves.
Now the point is here, in the center on the right.
And I can scale and it’s scaling from that point.
Another important setting in the Options bar is the Amount, currently it’s set to 100
and that should be default.
This is the ratio between Content-Aware Scale in regular scale.
At 100% you’re doing all Content-Aware Scale but if I bring that back to 0, notice how
the image will change.
It reverts back to regular scaling.
And, of course, 49% will be about 50-50.
So you’re doing half regular scale, half Content-Aware.
In most cases though, a 100% Content-Aware Scale is what you need.
You can also protect skin tones by clicking on this icon here.
We don’t have any skin tones in this image so we don’t need to worry about.
But if you’re working with a portrait, you may want to click on this icon to protect
the person in the portrait.
There’s also this Protect dropdown menu and it allows you to protect pixels in the
image.
And I’m going to show you how that works.
I’m just going to tap on this cancel button to cancel that Content-Aware and I’m just
going to move this over to the right and I’m going to show you how to protect the pixels
on the left-hand side here.
So, what you need to do is make the selection using the Lasso tool – it doesn’t have
to be very precise - around the areas that you want to protect.
Also notice that I have a Feather of almost 10 pixels, that’s okay.
That just means that it’s not going to be a sharp selection.
There’s going to be some blurriness to it.
Then I’m going to go into the Channels panel, create a New Channel and fill it with white
Alpha 1.
White is my background color.
I can press Ctrl + Backspace/Command Backspace on the Mac.
So now anything that is white will be protected and anything that is black can be adjusted
with the Content-Aware Scale.
I’m going to press Ctrl D/ Command D to deselect.
Click on RGB and go back into my Layers panel.
And if I go into Edit-Content-Aware Scale, under Protect, choose Alpha 1 because that’s
the name of the channel that we created.
We can scale that in and notice how the pixels in the white will be protected.
Notice how none of those pixels are changing, then you can click on the check mark and the
scale is complete.
Now I’m going to show you how I use this feature for something completely different.
Some of you may know I do writing for magazines and blogs regarding Photoshop, of course.
And when writing these articles I often have to take screenshots of the user interface
and those screenshots need to fit within specific spaces.
So, I have this screenshot of the Layers panel in Photoshop and this white space will represent
the area that needs to fit in.
So usually what I would do in the past would be to figure out the space that I needed,
so now I know it’s that space there and, obviously, it’s too tall.
So I would make a selection, hit the delete key, make a selection again and move that
up and try to fit it within that space.
As you see, this is very time consuming and it’s not very efficient.
I’m going to press Ctrl+ Alt Z/ Command Option Z on the Mac to undo.
But we can take advantage of that same Content-Aware technology and use it to solve this problem.
So what you can do is take your new eye element, figure out how big it needs to be and then
go to Edit-Content-Aware Scale and you can scale that in and notice how Photoshop knew
exactly what pixels were irrelevant and it kept all the pixels that contain the detail.
So this is a technique that I use that helps me speed up the process of creating screenshots
for the articles that I write.
Let me know if you come up with any other interesting ways of using the Content-Aware
Scale.
Leave a comment down below.
Don’t forget to watch the other videos in this Content-Aware series on my YouTube channel.
Once again, the link to the playlist is right below in the description.
If this is your first time at the Photoshop Training channel, don’t forget to subscribe.
Thank you so much for watching and I’ll talk to you again soon.