Friends who love developing photos must know that because the shooting size of a digital camera and the developing size of the photo usually do not match, when the photo is developed in a digital photo developing shop, a large portion of the wonderful content in the photo will be "cruelly" cut out, leaving the photo Flushing brings regret (Figure 1).
In versions prior to Photoshop CS4, it was very complicated to achieve lossless cropping operations. Now, using the " Content Aware Proportion " tool in Photoshop CS4 , you can achieve perfect lossless cropping by simply dragging the mouse. Now let’s try together how to crop a 6-inch photo without loss!
1. After starting Photoshop CS4, click the "Open" command in the menu bar, select and open the photo that needs to be processed. Then select the "Background" layer with the mouse and drag it to "Create New Layer" to make a copy of the background layer. Finally, use the mouse to drag the "Background" layer to "Delete Layer" to delete the locked "Background" layer (Figure 2). The purpose of these operations is to unlock the "Background" layer, allowing us to freely transform and use the content-aware proportion tools on the original image after opening it.
Create a “protective cover” to lock photo content
Before performing the specific "content recognition ratio" transformation, we need to manually "protect" some content in the photo that does not need to be transformed. To "protect", you must first create a "protective cover" to tell Photoshop which areas do not require "content-aware ratio" transformation.
2. The raw material for making this "protective cover" is the selection. Select the "lasso" tool in the toolbox and outline and circle the content that needs to be protected. Usually the content we need to protect is the main person or object in the photo.
3. Select "Select → Save Selection", enter the name of the protected thing in the name item of the pop-up "Save Selection" dialog box (Figure 3), and click "OK" to complete saving the selection.
The shooting size of digital cameras is somewhat inconsistent with the traditional printing size.
4. Select "Edit→Content Awareness Ratio" in the menu bar, and we can bring up the magical "Content Awareness Ratio" tool.
Tip: When we compress an image, the "Content Aware Scale" tool will intelligently compress non-important areas while retaining the main area. The original large and complex post-processing repair and retouching work has become very simple, with just a simple drag of the mouse.
5. In the protection item in the menu bar, select the name of the protective cover you created previously, in this case "Character" (Figure 4). This way we can tell Photoshop CS4 not to distort the content in that shield when doing Content-Aware Scale.
6. This time we are going to make 6-inch digital photos for development, so we need to enter the 6-inch photo size into the "X" and "Y" input boxes in the menu bar, and enter the values as "15.2" respectively. cm", "10.2 cm", and then click "Apply" to complete the modification. The editor also specially found out the actual sizes of 5 inches and 6 inches for your reference (Figure 5).
(5-inch, 6-inch actual size chart)
Comparison of renderings
The usage method and effect of the "Content Awareness Ratio" tool are very similar to the "Free Transformation" tool (Figures 6 and 7), and can be called an "upgraded version" of the Free Transformation tool. "Content recognition ratio" allows us to save a lot of complicated post-processing and retouching work, and no longer has to bear the pain of cropping out the necessary images.
After using the "Free Transform" tool to compress to a 6-inch scale, the main character is obviously deformed.
After compressing to a 6-inch scale using the "Content Aware Proportion" tool, the main character and cart remain original.
For another example, I took a landscape photo of a banner, which can be easily and quickly changed into a vertical composition version. Note that when using this technique, do not stretch horizontally and vertically at the same time. It can be done in two steps (Figure 8).
Note that the road in front of the banner and vertical renderings has become significantly narrower.