Just for Fun: Recompose a shot

Change the relationship between different parts of a shot with Photoshop’s Content-Aware tools

Change the scale and relationships of different objects in your scene

It’s often only when you review your pictures in the cold light of day that you realise you could have made some different choices that may have given a better composition. The ‘fix’ might have been as simple as getting the lens a bit closer to a subject to make it more dominant in the frame, or changing the camera position with a few steps to the left or right to alter the way the foreground works with the background.

Luckily, Photoshop gives you a second bite at the composition cherry, as you can use its tools to resize and reposition components of a scene. In the main, these methods are fairly sophisticated, but the littleknown Content-Aware tools are a gem. They make this kind of image manipulation dead easy!

We’ll start with Content-Aware Move. Open a picture in Photoshop CC, then select the tool. It’s grouped with the Healing Brush tools in the Essentials workspace, but has its own place in the Toolbox if you’re using the Photography workspace. Draw loosely around the item, then drag it into the position you want. To make it bigger or smaller, press Ctrl/Cmd+T and drag the handles around the bounding box before pressing Return. The tool will do its best to fill in the place where it used to be, so check this area to see if you have a naturallooking result. You may need to do a few simple repairs with the Clone Stamp Tool or Healing Brush.

Content-Aware Scale allows you to reformat the composition of an image without losing the core details. This means that if you have a horizontal pic, but want to turn it into a square-format image without cropping out the very details that make it work, you can! To use this tool, you first have to have either a floating, editable layer or a selection in place, so press Ctrl/Cmd+A to select the whole image.

Go to Edit > Content-Aware Scale and a bounding box will appear. This works like Free Transform, so you have to hold Shift to break free of the proportional scale; but when you drag the handles, the core components with fine detail will maintain their size and shape, whereas the low-detail areas will be compressed or expanded, depending on which way you go. Press Return when you’re happy, crop off the excess, and you’ll have a freshly recomposed image!