independently of another,

you need to work with a rectangular selection outline

that you create using the rectangular marquee tool.

And that's because that way you select entire rows

or columns of pixels at a time.

All right, now I'm going to draw a selection

that goes almost to the top of the rocks right here

on the left-hand side and all the way down

to the transparent region below the photograph.

And so, I want you to see here that I am very close.

The top of the selection is very close to the bottom corner

of this rock formation right here.

I want to make sure that I include this entire thing,

this weed,

but I don't include any of the foliage in the background.

All right, now I'll press control + 0

or command + 0 on the Mac to zoom out.

I do not want to stretch the boy's legs.

So I'm going to de-select them,

again, using the rectangular marquee tool

by pressing and holding the alt key.

So I get a minus sign next to my cursor,

and then I will de-select from over to the left

of Sam's wristband down to the right of Max's toe.

And I'll end up with this effect here.

So I have two rectangular regions of rocks selected.

I don't want to harm the original image.

So, jump this selection to a new layer

by pressing control + alt + J

or command + option + J on the Mac.

And I'll just go ahead and call this layer stretch

and then click okay.

All right, now I need to be able to scroll downward

a little bit like so,

and I'm doing so just using the scroll wheel on my mouse.

If you can't get that to work,

then press control + K or command + K on the Mac

to bring up the preferences dialog box,

switch to tools,

and then go ahead and turn on this guy, overscroll.

And it allows you to scroll any which way you like

regardless of the zoom ratio,

at which point, go ahead and click okay.

All right, now I could go ahead and stretch this layer

using the standard free transform command

located under the edit menu.

In which case I would go ahead and drag this bottom handle.

Unfortunately that scales the image proportionally.

So, as I drag I'll go ahead and press and hold

the shift key like so,

and then I'll drag downward until my height value

comes very close to 150%.

So notice the width value is a 100%,

which is to say,

we're scaling the layer exclusively vertically,

at which point we'll press the enter key

or the return key on the Mac to accept that change.

And then I'll zoom in on these rocks and you can see here

that they are exclusively stretched.

So they're now much taller than they are wide

on a uniform basis, by the way.

So, every rock is stretched

and we have this very pronounced seam right here

between the unstretched pixels and the stretched ones.

And that seam appears over here to the left of Sam as well

Notice this rock, doesn't look right at all.

All right so, I'll go ahead and press control + Z

or command + Z the on the Mac to undo that change

and I'll go ahead and zoom out once again

and scroll down as well.

And this time, instead of using free transform,

I'm going to take advantage of this command,

content aware scale,

which will allow us to stretch the layer

while introducing a little bit of AI.

In other words, Photoshop is going to automatically decide

which details it scales on the fly.

And so I'll go ahead and choose that command.

And again, if I just drag down on this handle,

I scaled the image proportionally,

which doesn't even make sense,

it defies the purpose of this command in the first place.

But then anyway,

I'll go ahead and press and hold the shift key,

as I drag this guy down

and I will once again, drag that handle down

until I have a height value of more or less, 150%

At which point, I'll press the enter key

or the returning key on the Mac to accept that change.

And now I want you to see what we've got.

Not all of the rocks are scaled to 150%.

Some are scaled much less, and some are scaled even more.

And as a result, we have this kind of molten effect

where we have these wave patterns in the rocks,

which obviously is not acceptable.

So, I'm going to press control + Z

or command + Z on the Mac to undo that change.

And I'll go ahead and zoom out a little bit

and I'll return to the edit menu

and once again, choose content aware scale.

And I want you to notice a couple of options over here.

We've got this guy, its job is to protect skin tones.

You can experiment with it if you want.

Doesn't work very well.

Then we have this protect option,

which is going to seem mystifying

cause, it's just going to read none.

For it to read anything else,

you would need an alpha channel.

So, in additional channel in the channels panel,

which would then protect certain details inside the image,

we don't need that however.

We do need this guy right here, the amount value,

which is going to allow us to minimize

some of the distortion.

So, what I'll do,

is I'll go ahead and drag this handle down right here,

the bottom middle handle, that is to say

while pressing the shift key.

So, I go ahead and expand this guy

so that the height value is once again,

in the neighborhood of 150%,

and now you can see once again,

we have that kind of flowing effect there, those wavy rocks,

at which point, I'll go ahead and reduce the amount value

and notice that that brings back some of the structure.

So if I crank it all the way down to 0%,

it's the same as if I was using the free transform command.

We're not introducing any AI at all.

Which is why I'll go ahead and take it up a little bit.

But even at 20%, we ended up getting some waves

and so, I ended up coming up with a value of 12%,

which I found just by pressing the up and down arrow keys

until I got something I liked.

At which point I'll press the enter key

or the return key on the Mac a couple of times

to accept that change.

All right now, because we reduced that value,

we're going to get some seams.

And so what you want to do

is select the spot healing brush tool,

which has a keyboard shortcut of J

and then go up to the options bar

and turn on sample all layers.

And then I'm going to press the right bracket key a few times

in order to expand the size of my cursor.

And I'll just go ahead and paint back and forth

up along this line, like so,

and that should help to get rid of that seam.

All right, we need to do the same thing over here

on the left side of Sam starting right about there,

is where I'm seeing the seam

and then just painting down and what we're looking for,

where the transition between the tiny rocks

and the big rocks is concerned.

We want the little rocks to look like they're overlapping

onto the big ones.

That's going to make the most visual sense anyway,

and then I'll go ahead and paint down like so,

and if you paint out into this region, it's entirely fine.

All right, now press control + 0

or commands + 0 on the Mac in order to center my zoom

and I'll press the M key

to switch back to my rectangular marquee tool.

And that's how you stretch an image detail

while adding a little bit of AI to the equation,

using the content aware scale command.

(upbeat music)