Tuesday Tips & Pics - Expanding Your Canvas

Welcome to Tips & Pics! My tip today is how to expand your canvas to change a vertical picture to a horizontal picture.

I was editing pictures from my session with 2-Year-Old Brooke and I realized that the vast majority of the pictures were vertical.  I forget sometimes to shoot horizontally because I like to fill my frame--but negative space can work so well!  So I started with this picture of Brooke:

First, I decided to put in black and white, because all my pictures of her were starting to look the same!




Then I went to Image-->Canvas Size. I hit the middle right arrow, to anchor my image to the right side and I expanded my width to 6500 pixels.



Then I used the clone stamp to start filling in the white space. But first, I duplicated my layer. I always do my cloning on a duplicated layer. And then I can create a layer mask, that way if I mess up my cloning I can paint in black on my layer mask to erase my mistake. It was a bit of a painstaking process, because I you can see there wasn't a lot of background to work with! But once I got a little bit of it going, it was easy to keep copying it to finish.



Once it was all filled in I darkened it a little and added a touch of texture to help my cloning blend better (and used a layer mask to remove the texture from Brooke.) This was my result:




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It's a helpful trick to know how to do, but the time it takes to get it right reminds me of the importance of getting it right IN camera first! I need to remind myself to take more horizontal shots!

What have you been shooting?