Often times we talk about re-cropping a photo to the "rule of thirds" for more aesthetic composition. But this can often be difficult if it was not cropped that way in the camera since there will not be enough space on one side or the other of a photo.
In this tutorial I'll teach a very simple "trick" that you can use in Photoshop to add extra working space. This only works on shots that have been made on uniform backgrounds (such as a seamless background). Here is the example photo that we'll be working with:
For this photo we want to add working space on the right side to make the overall composition somewhat observe a "rule of thirds". Here is how we proceed.
Step1: Expand the working space
Select the Image | Canvas size option as shown:
When you choose this option, you then see this dialog:
We want to add space on the right, so you must click the Anchor Grid as shown by the cursor arrow in the above screen shot. I know this seems a bit weird that we click on the left of the grid to add space on the right, but that is the way it works.
When you click as shown, you'll see the following screen shot:
You can see here the result of the click. Now we need to change the width to a higher number since we are adding width to the photo. We'll change the 400 to 600 as shown. Then click OK and that brings us to this screen shot:
As you can see we've added the extra space, but as shown by the arrows the space is quite apparent and does not match the lighting on our background. What do do?
Step 2: Make the expansion have the shadow pattern of the original Background
Select the Rectangular Marquee tool and draw a selection as shown in the screen shot below:
Now press Ctrl T (which invokes the Free Transform tool) and makes the selection look like this:
Grab the handle on the right side as shown and drag all the way to the right as you can see in the following screen shot:
Then click on the Black check mark as shown (or just hit Enter) to confirm the transformation. Now press Ctrl D to get rid of the marquee and you'll see the result of your work. By comparison, here is what you'll see:
You have added the working space on the right and it looks like it is really part of the background. Now if we turn on our "Rule of Thirds" grid, we can see that we have a reasonable rule of thirds composition.
Conclusions:
Now it may not seem like very much happened in this tutorial, but actually you'll find the principles introduced quite useful especially in graphic work where you need to expand working space to fill a space, or for inclusion of text or composite graphics etc. Also it lets you see how the Canvas command works which often baffles new users of Photoshop. I literally use this technique 2 or 3 times a week in preparing images for websites.
Cheers,
rfs
Working space - a Tutorial
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