Photoshop Workbench 156: Improving Landscape Photography with Content-Aware Scaling
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The new Content-Aware Scaling feature in Photoshop CS4 will blow your mind. It’s capable of scaling the area around a primary subject while simultaneously protecting the subject itself from scaling. This sort of power makes it easy to expand a sky or shrink an undesirable region. Imagine being able to fit a 5×7 inch image into a 4×6 space without cropping. In this tutorial, we’ll examine a groundbreaking use for Content-Aware Scaling that will change the way you think about capturing wide-angle landscape photographs.
The key to a successful grand-scale scenic is a captivating foreground, middleground, and background. In beautiful places, such as Zion National Park, where Bruce Bader captured this image of The Watchman, locating an engaging foreground and background is usually not too difficult. Once you’ve selected the right foreground and background subjects, the challenge is tying them together with a pleasing middleground. All too often, the middleground is simply too expansive and detracts from the photograph. Today, I’ll show you how to use Content-Aware Scaling to minimize, and thus de-emphasize, a middleground.
Thursday, December 18, 2008 at 6:16 am
Hi, can’t seem to view the small version of this tutorial
Thursday, December 18, 2008 at 10:31 am
Hi Mark,
I’m really enjoying this series of CS4 tutorials. Today’s was especially helpful. I’m getting ready to produce an image critique from Death Valley and really can use this tool.
Cheers,
Alec
Thursday, December 18, 2008 at 12:33 pm
Hi Mark,
I too can’t view this workbench. I’m on a PC and tried both Firefox and IE7.
James
Thursday, December 18, 2008 at 2:47 pm
Mark,
Thanks for the quick PSWorkbench, very nicely done. What a incredible tool! Drag out the archives of images……I enjoyed the two CS4 previews as well. Thanks.
Travis
Friday, December 19, 2008 at 9:45 am
Mark, This is a great tool. Thank you for demonstrating its use..I will now review some of my pictures so I can try this procedure..Dick Betchley
Friday, December 19, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Content aware video will not play. Others do
Saturday, December 20, 2008 at 1:48 am
Workbench a bit slow to load. What an amazing tool the Content aware Scaling feature is. Thank you Mark.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008 at 7:15 am
dear Mark,
I wish you and your family a very merry time of joy.please do get some rest, you have been sooo busy. thank you for everything you have been doing.
and everyone else here in the community: I wish you too the best!
* ho ho ho smiles,
‘thunder’
Thursday, December 25, 2008 at 5:12 pm
I love the way you always use Photoshop features with intent! Thank you for this demonstration of one possibility for Content-Aware Scaling. I have so many images which need to be re-sized, but not cropped; it’s going to be fun to explore this option.
Wishing you and your family much joy in this holiday season and throughout the New Year!
Friday, December 26, 2008 at 11:46 am
Warmest wishes of the season to you, Mark, and to your family.
I really appreciate all of the work you put into your PS videos. They are without a doubt the best photoshop resource I have seen.
I’m a bit disappointed that the new streaming software you use doesn’t work all of the time. For instance, I can’t view this video (#156) at all. #157 starts up but then crashes every time. This is with both ie7 and firefox, on a fairly recent build PC with xp pro OS.
Regardless, I’m grateful for the videos I can view.
Keep well in ‘09.