Tip: Straighten a photo with Generative Expand
Use Generative Expand to fill in the edges of a straightened image in Adobe Photoshop.
Published
Introduction
Today, I'm going to show you how to straighten any photo and automatically fill in the gaps using Generative expand.
Hey there, my name is Aaron Nace, founder of PHLEARN.com.
We've got a really exciting new feature here in Photoshop.
So, we've got a great sample image here.
You can see our subjects are having fun at the beach, but our horizon is not as straight, so we want to go ahead and straighten out our horizon.
Straightening a photo using the crop tool
So, typically we would go ahead and grab our Crop Tool.
So, let's start there.
So we're going to start by accessing the Crop Tool from the Toolbar.
Let's go ahead and click on our Crop Tool or you can hit C for the Crop Tool.
Now within the Crop Tool at the very top, we're going to take our Fill, I'm going to change to the default setting, which is going to fill with our background.
Fantastic.
And now want to use one of my favorite features.
This is the Straighten feature within the Crop Tool.
Simply click here on Straighten and then click on your horizon and drag over to the other side of your horizon, and as soon as you let go, this tool automatically straightens your image.
That looks really, really good.
Now you can see with the traditional Crop Tool, this is our crop boundary, outside of this, all of these image pixels would be lost traditionally, because the Crop Tool has to basically remove some of the image in order to straighten it.
But now, we're going to be using artificial intelligence to get around that.
We're actually going to be adding new pixels that have never existed before.
So, here's what we're going to do.
Expanding the canvas to recover lost image areas
We're going to take this crop boundary, here on the bottom right and simply click and drag that out.
Fantastic.
And you can make this as large or as small as you would like.
We're just going to drag that out like that as well.
Let's go ahead and zoom out.
And here we can see that all of this area here around the edge basically doesn't have any information.
So we use artificial intelligence to fill in those gaps.
So up here at the top, we're going to go to our Contextual taskbar where it says Generative Expand.
Filling gaps with generative expand
Just go ahead and click on Generative Expand.
There we go.
And here you can see my Fill automatically changes to Generative Expand as well.
Now it asks us, what would you like to generate?
This is optional if you want to use this suggested, basically what the artificial intelligence thinks should go there, all you have to click is Generate.
There we go.
And here we can see it's generating.
This is actually using artificial intelligence.
Just takes a couple of seconds to generate new pixels that have literally never existed before.
This technology is absolutely incredible.
And there you can see, it's done.
Oh my gosh!
If you go into your Properties panel, you can see you have multiple different variations, and if some of those variations are satisfying you, you can always click on Generate, here again in your Properties panel or in your Contextual Taskbar.
Let's go to our Layers panel and take a look at this.
Comparing results and reviewing AI-generated variations
Here's our before.
This is what would have happened with a traditional Crop Tool.
It would have basically just been the background color here around the edges.
But now, thanks to artificial intelligence, we can generate all that information from scratch and get a beautiful image perfectly straightened and using artificial intelligence to fill in the gaps.
So we can see how the power of artificial intelligence with Generative Expand can make a huge difference in your photos, completely fixing composition and filling in brand new pixels.
Instruction by
Adobe Stock Contributor
