Stretching the Background of Your Images

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

In this video from PixImperfect, you’ll learn a great trick for stretching the background of your photo without distorting your subject in Photoshop. Learn how to use Content-Aware Scale effectively.

If you need to extend the edges of a photo, for example to make it fit a particular format such as A4, you can use a Photoshop technique to stretch or even shrink unimportant parts of your image.

And you can do this without stretching or shrinking the most important parts. Here’s how it works: click the layer you want to stretch, then go to Content-Aware Scale in the Edit menu (Content-Aware Scale).

Now grab a side or corner point and start dragging in the direction you want. Somehow, Photoshop determines what is important in the image and tries to lock that part in place.

So if you’re editing a landscape photo, it will only stretch the sky, for example, and not the mountains. It’s a very good method, and it’s incredible how much you can often stretch an image without ruining it. When you’re done, press Return (PC: Enter) to apply this clever stretching.

One more thing: if there are people in the photo and you’ve selected 'Content-Aware Scale', click Protect Skin Tones (the little person icon) in the options bar before you actually start stretching.

Photoshop will then take the people in the image into account and won’t stretch them.

Want to learn more about editing images in Photoshop?

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