Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Content-Aware Scaling

Once in a blue moon, a software company adds a feature that works almost like magic. Adobe did exactly that with Content-Aware Scale (affectionately known in nerdy circles as CAS). CAS examines what’s in an image and intelligently adds or removes pixels from unimportant areas as you change the overall size of the image. The magic part? It leaves the important bits—such as people—unchanged. Think of web pages you’ve used that resize themselves smoothly and fluidly as you make the browser window bigger or smaller; now imagine doing the same thing with an image.

A picture really is worth a thousand words when it comes to CAS, so take a peek at Figure 6-22 to see what this feature can do.

Figure 6-22. With CAS, Photoshop doesn’t squash or stretch the whole image; it only adds or deletes chunks of things like the big ol’ sky in the background and the grass in the foreground, leaving the important parts unscathed. As you can see here, CAS does an amazing job of resizing only the not-so-important areas in this image. To test-drive CAS using the images in this section, head to this book’s Missing CD page at www.missingmanuals.com/cds and download the file CAS.zip.

You can use CAS in all kinds of situations. For example, say you need room for text in your image, so you need to make it taller or wider. Or perhaps you need to drop a picture into a 4-inch ad space but the subjects ...