How I Expand Backdrop Edges in Photoshop, Super Easy Tutorial

Hey guys, Irene here. Welcome back to my YouTube channel. Today I have a very quick and easy tutorial on how I expand backdrop edges in Photoshop. You know I love using these collapsible backdrops. They work just like a reflector, easy to store and move, but they have these rounded edges that sometimes I can see in my images. But I never care too much because it is very easy to fix and I'll show you how I do it. Let's start with this left corner right here. I'm going to grab a lasso tool and make a selection of the thing that I want to get rid of. I'm also going to include these little ripples in here because I want to get rid of them. So that's going to take care of everything at the same time. I'm going to right click on this selection and choose content aware fill. I love using content aware fill for backdrops and I find that it works much better than generative fill. For some reason I never have good luck with generative fill on these texture backdrops, but content aware fill always works great on just auto. So I just have it set on auto and it did an amazing job here in the preview. You know you can zoom in and see it looks great. So I'm just going to press ok. It immediately creates an empty layer with what we just did. So you know here is the little filled in selection. I'm gonna deselect this area and that corner is pretty much done. So we're going to do the same thing on the other side. I'm going to select the background because we are still working on the background layer. I still have my lasso tool on and now I'm going to make this selection right here. You don't have to be super precise with your selection. If it's just a one color textured backdrop it doesn't matter too much. I'm going to right click on here now and press content aware fill again and yeah it did a really really good job filling in that spot. So I'm just going to press ok and deselect this area. Now it's going to get a little bit more annoying here at the bottom because now we actually have a little part of her dress that's connected to the area that we need to fill in. So if I just grab this area right here and I press content aware fill okay what's going to happen a lot of the time is that it's going to grab some of that area of the dress and sometimes it looks okay but most of the time it doesn't look that great. So I'm going to show you how to fix that. So we're still on the background layer. I'm going to go to select and press subject. So what we're going to do is we're going to cut her out on a different layer and we're always going to have that layer on top. So no matter what we do with the background and how we mess it up she's going to stay the same. Now Photoshop does a pretty good job nowadays at selecting the subjects automatically and it did a really good job here. If for some reason you're having trouble make sure you're on any like of the selection tools. Right click and you can press select and mask and here you can fiddle in with your selection and fix it if anything didn't get selected. Everything looks great so I'm just going to press okay. I'm going to right click on the selection and press layer via copy. So now here I have the copy that is just her. So see if I take this out it's just the model cut out. So yeah now whatever we do on this background layer is not going to affect the models only going to affect like the background. Okay so yeah we're going to go ahead and select this area now without worrying. Okay and right click on it content aware fill and now to make sure that this dress is not getting more elongated and bigger we're going to make sure that the dress is not selected in the pixels. So the green color identifies all of the pixels that are being used to fill in your spot. Okay so because I had some of the dress in the green area it was using some of the pixels from the dress to fill in this spot if that makes sense. And I do not want that I just wanted to fill in just with the backdrop. So that looks good. Now if you see little imperfections on the backdrop like it kind of multiplied some areas that makes it look a little fake don't worry about it because we can fix it later. We're just trying to kind of fill in the background overall so I'm just going to press okay now. And yeah as you can see if I take this out the dress is messed up but because I have this layer on top which is just the model it just keeps her intact. And now we're going to do the same thing on the other side and I'm going to actually grab these wrinkles here on this backdrop together. Okay right click content aware fill and same thing again making sure we're not selecting any of the dress because we do not want that. We only want the backdrop. Okay so that looks good enough. I'm just going to press okay and deselect. All right so we pretty much expanded the background but we have a few little spots that we need to fix. This area right here, these few areas right here. So now those ones I'm going to be fixing with generative fill. But before we do that I want to get rid of all of these different you know little pieces where we were fixing the background. So I'm just going to hold ctrl and select these areas and together with background and then right click on it and press merge layers. But I'm still keeping the model layer on top because again I just want to make sure that we can freely mess with the background without worrying about messing our model. Okay so I'm gonna select the background layer again. We still have the lasso tool on and I'm gonna start selecting areas. Now here again don't worry you can select over her dress because we have her cut out on top. I'm gonna hold shift to select a few more areas. I'm gonna select this one, this one pretty much anywhere where I see that I don't really love. Just a few areas. Sometimes it just kind of repeats the pattern and maybe we want to get rid of it. Okay right that's a lot but I'm gonna right click on these areas now and press generative fill and I'm not putting anything in the prompt and I'm just gonna press generate. Normally photoshop actually suggests not putting anything in the prompt and it works really great that way. That's what I found especially for these backdrops is to just not put anything in there. All right let's see a few different options that it's giving us. Okay I actually like this third one the most. Okay as you can see it kind of took out those few little imperfections and you can just keep going and kind of messing with the background if you want to. I think it looks pretty good so I'm just gonna leave it at that. And now I actually want to expand it even more and now it's even easier because we have quite a big area to work with. So I'm just gonna maybe expand it a little bit like this to make it a little bit more symmetrical. I'm gonna grab a marquee tool and select this area right here. Right click content aware fill. Does a great job on its own. I'm gonna press ok deselect and then I'm gonna merge this together and just do one last little generative fill in few areas. So I'm gonna select this whole area right here. It just looks a little jank to me. Also as you can see it doubled this area right here. So we're gonna generative fill those. I think let's generate it one more time. I didn't really like the suggestions that it gave me. Okay I think I like this one right here. Yeah that looks great. So I'm gonna merge these together and yeah this is the finished image. And I mean in reality you can just keep expanding this as much as you want and just kind of using the same technique. Using content aware fill and then using generative fill to just get rid of any little spots that you might not like. I hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial and I hope this was easy to follow. Let me know what other tutorials you would like to see in the future. Give this video a like, subscribe to my channel and I'll see you guys in my next one. Bye!