If you frequently photograph moving subjects, then you have probably managed to, on occasion, mess up the framing. Here is one of mine that almost flew out of the frame, opened in Photoshop. Its a well exposed, sharp photograph, but I blew the composition by not paying attention to the entire view in my camera's viewfinder. So, should you send this one to the trash?

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  The answer is no, if you own Photoshop. If you've read my previous blogs, then you know I already have a tutorial on fixing composition errors in Photoshop, so what is different about this tutorial. Its quicker, easier and requires less work on your part! It does require you to own a newer version of Photoshop that has the Content-Aware function.

  Let's fix this photo. As you can see above, I've already opened the photo in Photoshop. Next, go to Image > Canvas Size. Your screen will look like this.

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  Click on Canvas Size and you will get a dialogue box like this.

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  You want to modify the width of the photo, so add two inches to the existing width in the width box. You don't want to change the height, so  leave that alone. The next step is to choose an Anchor Point. This will tell Photoshop what part of the photo remains the same and which part gets added on to. For this photo you want to choose the arrow that is in the center, pointing left. Your screen will look like this.

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  Click OK and your screen will look like this.

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Now, select the Rectangular Marquee Tool.

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  Using the Rectangular Marquee Tool, select the new area of you photo, which in this case is the black area, plus a little of the original photo's background sky. Make sure you do not select any part of the plane. You'll have something like this selected.

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In the area you have selected, right click to bring up the dialogue box and click on Fill.

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  After clicking Fill, you'll see this dialogue box. In Content select Content-Aware.

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  Click OK and you'll get this.

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  On your keyboard press Cltrl + the letter D to deselect the new area of the photo. Now, go to the Crop Tool so you can crop the photo to a more pleasing composition.

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  Here is my final crop.

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  And my final image after just a little tonal adjustment and sharpening.

C-FIJAAir Canada Jazz
Bombardier CRJ-200ER
C-FIJA / 165


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  That's all there is to it! This technique is especially useful if you upload your airline photos to websites like Airliners.net. They are incredibly picky about the aircraft in the photo being level and centered and this is a quick easy way to fine tune an image to fit their demanding criteria.