Using content-aware scale

- So in this movie the first thing we're going to experience here is something that's unfortunately all too common, in the world of graphic production, in that there's going to be a change. So our client is decided they no longer want this woman here in front. They want another shot that they've provided. So just because customers can change their mind, what we're going to do is we're going to is we're going to accommodate them and just turn off the layers that are concerned here.

So because I need a bit more for my layers panel, I've got my layers set to really big so it's easier for you to see them. I'm just going to double click on the properties panel tab there. And I'm going to select a few layers here. Or to be more specific, the first two. So the adjustment layer is active already, I'm going to hold down shift and click the layer beneath it to select that as well as the adjustment layer. And then I'm going to bring them into a folder. And you do that using the short cut command G or control G or the small icon down at the bottom here.

Fact I'll click that because I was down there indicating so. Okay I'm just going to call this climber old there. Not that she's old, but it's the old image of the climber. And then I'm going to turn off the visibility for that layer group. And both of those layers are turned off at the same time. Okay so let's bring in our new image. So what we're going to do is to the file menu and come down and choose place linked, and this time we'll choose mountaintop posed Jpeg.

Bring that in. And that's almost exactly the proportions we want. We do need a whole load of sky for this. So I'm just going to double click there. However we do need it to go from side to side, so we've got a little bit of work to do here. So what we're going to do is we're going to select this sky and remove it and let our existing sky show through. And the quick selection tool should make short work of doing that. See just moving around there very quickly, get's pretty much most of that selection.

Just need to come into this region here to select that, just have a quick look around there.' Brilliant. We can now go to select mask, to refine that. And I didn't invert the selection. So what I'm going to do is here in select mask click invert on the side and there we go. Now we've got access to that selection. Let's bring down that transparency here our onion skin so you've got a bit less backpack there. In fact we could even change that to one of the other modes if that was helpful.

So we'll zoom in a little bit here. So I'm going to get the zoom tool on the left hand side and just drag very gently, just there and have a look at this I think that's made a pretty good job of that selection. There is a small area just in here that we could get. So this has a quick selection tool as well. And I'm just gunna change the size of it, gunna make this quite small. Here so about 14 maybe just slightly less, here just to get in there five is plenty good enough. And I'll pick that up like so. So what I need to do here is to get rid of it.

So I'm going to hold down the alt or option key and then click in that region there and you'll see now we've got a hole through that. If I just change my view here to overlay, mine's set to green quite often it's red you can see the effect, the selection. Now I sure am very glad I did that because I found a couple of areas that do need some attention. Let me just set my color back to the default just here, so you'll see it in a similar way. That arm isn't completely selected.

I can tell by it being slightly orange. So I don't need to hold a key down, I'm just going to brush down there. Stay away from the edges remember, we can deal with those later. And just get these bits just here. Nice soft edges there. So it's selecting all of those for us. Excellent, that's really good. And then what we'll do is we'll go for the refine edge tool here. Okay and a smaller brush probably necessary for what we're going to do here. So I'm bringing this down to about 50 some odd, and just going around the edges of the hair there like so.

And you can see that the selection there has grown nicely. Just gunna deal with this soft edge here. Not bad. Just gone down that edge just slightly and it's improved that no end. That's just grand so now we've done that. Jus have another quick look around, just to make sure this is fine. And I think that pretty much is. I'm just gunna do command zero control zero to fit that. Okay now that's fit. What I'm going to do is switch back to the onion skin, so it's ready for next time.

And then hit output to new layer, with a layer mask. So if I do that and hit okay, once again the other layer's still there so all of the information is preserved. But we've got this new layer with a layer mask. So we need to get some rocks out to the edges here. And we're going to use something really cool to do that, that can analyze this and it has a pretty good success rate with images like this. So what we're going to do is go to the edit menu.

And come down and choose content aware scale and find that it's grayed out. And the reason that it's grayed out is that I'm still targeted on the layer mask. So I'm gunna come down and click on the pixels just there. And I'll go back to content aware scale. This gives us another transformation box around it. But what we're going to do is just drag out to the left like so. And can you see what's happening. She's being preserved but the rocks there are being transformed.

Nice. You might even try and go a little bit further just a tiny bit. No that's starting to really stretch on that left hand side. So I think we'll be fine with just that. Again this is one of those where you can just hit the tic or return to apply that. And there we are. Nice job. And I think that it's actually fixed the mask as well. Let's have a quick look, just turn it off and on. So I'm just holding down the shift key and clicking on the mask just there. Yeah there's no visible change. The stacking order now needs to change.

So I'm gunna bring the backpack layer up to the top of the stack by dragging that up. That can do it a bit of transformation, so command T or control T to bring that down like so. And what you could do now is you could add in your other logos that you made earlier. So one of your messy fluggers that you made right at the beginning of the chapter. In the next movie we're going to look at cropping this image.