Crop outside the image!

Once in a while when correcting an image for keystone or lens distortion, you might find that you end up losing an important part of the image.

In the crop tool in Capture One, you have the option to allow cropping outside the image.  When correcting for keystone or lens distortion in Capture One Pro 6, this can be a very helpful feature.

At first it may not seem to be a useful solution of the problem, but when combined with the Content Aware Fill in Adobe Photoshop CS5, it turns out to be a super easy and powerful solution.

The image above was shot with a wide angle lens as it was impossible to get further away from the castle. On the right side, you see the image after Keystone correction. Only by allowing Capture One to crop outside the image, was it possible to keep the entire castle building within the image. After cropping, the missing lower left foreground was easily fixed with Content Aware Fill.

In the Crop Tool in Capture One, you find the checkbox that allows you to crop outside the image. Once set, you can make a crop that covers the entire castle.

With the Magic Wand Tool in Adobe Photoshop CS5, you can easily select the gray areas from the regions outside the original image. Once selected, use the Content Aware Fill option.

The Content Aware Fill will fill in the missing part of the image with contents from the adjacent regions in the real image.  It is done so intelligently that you, in most cases, won’t be able to do a better fill manually.