See the wisdom of Photoshop CS4’s ability to bend and stretch (1)

Whether you can adhere to equal scaling has always been an important criterion for evaluating whether a designer is rigorous, at least that's what I personally think. Free transformation in one direction always causes stiff stretching or compression of photos, especially for photos of people, which is simply devastating. Usually, I'd rather crop or do a lot of touch-ups than yank an image. But cutting is a "sacrifice" and patching is a "nightmare"!

When I wake up from the dream, Content Aware Scale comes...

Here is a photo of a bronze mirror taken at the Museum of Introspection. I wish the two bronze mirrors were closer together.

Figure 1: Museum Bronze Mirror Aperture f2.2 Shutter 1/80 sec IS O 800

First, I used the Free Transform command (Ctrl+T) to reduce the horizontal direction of the image to 70% of the original image. You can see that the image is obviously deformed, and the bronze mirror as the main body is much "thinner". It would be great if people could lose weight so quickly, haha.

Figure 2: Scaling an image using Free Transform

For the same picture, I tried using the content awareness scale command of Photoshop CS4, which is located in the main menu "Edit>Content-Aware Scale". Also reduce the horizontal direction of the image to 70% of the original image. You can see that the bronze mirror as the main body retains its "original flavor". This command intelligently identifies the main body and only compresses the less important gaps.

Figure 3: Effect of using content-aware scaling However, you should never expect a computer program to be as intelligent as a human being. In the face of strong extrusion or complex picture environments, sometimes it is powerless. For example, in this picture, the main car and cement pipe have been squeezed and deformed at 60% of the original picture.
Figure 4: Failure using content-aware scaling