As promised last week, today we are going to magically create extra space. I use this technique from time to time to fix framing. Perhaps I need to crop out another bird in the background that is distracting but in so doing it leaves me with too little room around the edge of the image. Perhaps the bird was too fast for me and by the time I pressed the shutter the bird is just too close to the edge. At other times, my lens is not quite wide enough leaving me with too little room above a mountain peak. These are all fixable. You can magically create more space. Here is how.

So here is my original image. As you can see, the image just does not work because the bird is flying out of the image, there is not enough space for the bird to fly into. Rather than trash the image we are going to fix it. Click on the crop tool on the left. Make sure that you place a check mark in "content aware." Now change the "original ratio" setting to just "ratio." Click and hold the right middle crop mark and drag it too the right.

Click the "okay" check mark in the middle top of the screen and watch the magic happen.

We can repeat the process and get the following result.

In the area where the red circle is was a repetitive pattern that did not seem as though it would occur in nature. This can easily been cleaned up using the clone tool. We can then crop the image to get a final picture.

What do you think? Look at all the space we created in front of the bird; magical. This is really easy and only take few seconds. Most people think that the cropping tool in Photoshop is just for cropping in but it can also be used to crop out, for stretching the edge and creating space that once did not exist. This is a powerful tool that can improve many images and even save some that would otherwise have been trashed.

          I hope that you found this tip useful. Try it.