From the course: After Effects Guru: Advanced Photoshop Integration

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Extending a background

Extending a background

- A lotta times if you work with an image as a background, it's not gonna be big enough. We sometimes call this set extension. And fortunately there's a great tool for Content-Aware Scale that makes it easy to reshape a background. Let me show you. Let's open this one up, and what I've already done is created an alpha channel to mask out parts of the image. We covered alpha channels in the previous section when we talked about making depth maps. This is simply a saved selection. And I made a basic selection that went around the cars and the buildings loosely. Now, what I'm gonna do is transform things. So let's select the RGB channel and turn off the mask. With the layer active, you can choose Edit, Content-Aware Scale. This has a pop-up menu that makes it really easy to choose what to protect. So you could protect the masked area. Now, as you stretch, the parts in the alpha channel are locked down. So the buildings on the left aren't modified, but I can reshape the right-hand side of…

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