How to Easily Switch a Portrait-Cropped Minimalist Photo to Landscape

It is always hard to gauge what photos in your portfolio might interest people. What do you do if someone likes a shot but wants the crop rotated?

I ran into this recently after a longtime friend inquired about buying a print of a photo. I have a minimalist shot of a horizon featuring the ripples of the water and a blue gradient sky. The prospective buyer said the photo is calming and exactly what he needs on his wall, but wanted to know if it could be printed in landscape orientation instead. You could simply order the print this way and crop a large portion of the top and bottom off, but that would effectively change the composition and depth of the photo in a negative way. Luckily, this can be a fairly easy process using the Content Aware scale feature found in Adobe Photoshop. I simply duplicated the layer, opened the canvas size, and adjusted the width to be 200 percent.

I then selected the Content Aware scale, found under the edit menu, and dragged the edges of the image to the new wider boundaries.

This process may take some more tweaking with more complex subjects involving man-made structures or people, but the same concept still applies. Check out this before and after to see how effective the technique was here.

You can really see the difference between what you would lose by cropping versus using this trick.

Since you won't always have both orientations at your disposal, knowing how to resize images without too much stretching or distortion can come in handy. When has Content Aware scaling helped you out? Share with us in the comments.