Need to reconfigure image to fit different dimensions...

[thePixelPixie]

Hi there,
I'm a long-time Illustrator user, but only rarely use Photoshop. But I just got a client project that requires a bit more complexity than I'm comfortable with currently. Trying to figure out the best way to do this, so I'm hoping some experts here will be willing to give me some pointers.

So, the project is a CD cover. Client has an old leather-bound book cover he's had scanned at high res. But of course it's in a portrait orientation, with leather embossing on it. There's also a circular area in which I need to place a different photo (that part I think I have covered fine). My difficulty is in figuring out how to modify the book cover to fit the square shape of the CD template. Am I going to have to cut out every design element of the embossing and duplicate things? I was hoping it might not be as horribly involved as it's appearing it may be afterall.

Here is a low-res copy of the book cover scan. The dimensions it needs to fit into are 5.492x4.94 + bleed. And the picture area needs to remain roughly the same size. I'm suspicious that this is going to end up being way more complex than I bid for

 

[Rich54]

Is this acceptable? I did it in about 10 minutes, working extremely quickly just to see if my idea was even feasible. The red outline is the original dimension of the image. The new leather image right now is nearly square, but from here it can be re-sized into the proper proportions without much distortion.

Let me know if this looks ok for your purposes and I’ll tell you the steps that I took.

 

[thePixelPixie]

Thanks much.

That actually might be ok. Let me ask the client if he's ok with cropping out that bit of the cover. I would think it would be good. I would very much like to know what steps you took.

 

[Rich54]

I don't know anything about Illustrator, so possibly you can do all this from there instead of Photoshop.

1. Using the elliptical vector shape tool, make a selection of the oval cowboy image, including its leather-tooled oval frame. Copy that to a new layer and save for later. (Temporarily turn off the layer visibility so that it's not in the way.)
2. The basic idea is to crop-out the area enclosed by the red outline in the image below (make a rectangular selection and press 'Delete'). I grabbed as much area as I could to crop out, but I was careful to preserve the decorative elements in the upper corners, as well as the fancy leather tooling that starts just below the red outline.
3. Once you've cropped-out that middle section, make a selection of the upper portion of the image (the part that still remains above the red outline) and move it down until it joins up with the lower portion. By pure luck, it turns out that the image is now nearly square---appropriate for a CD cover.
4. Now grab the oval layer that you saved in Step 1 and move that into position for the best fit. You can choose to scale it a bit smaller, but I left it at its original size.
5. There were a few gaps, i.e., areas that I cropped-out that were not fully covered up by the oval cowboy image, but they consisted entirely of the plain verticle ribbing, which is fairly easy to replicate using the Clone Stamp.
6. When you're all done, you can re-scale the image to the specific dimensions you need.

As you correctly point out, my method does lose a bit of tooling in the lower portion of the image because it's now covered up by the oval frame.

 

[thePixelPixie]

This is outstanding. I really appreciate it. Thank you!

 

[Rich54]

Thanks, glad I could help.

It just occurred to me that the more obvious solution is to simply re-scale the entire image into the required CD dimensions. You say you are going to replace the center cowboy image with something else. That's the only thing that is obviously distorted to a casual viewer. All the leather tooling is, of course, also distorted compared to the original, but it still looks nice. Just make sure to replace the cowboy after you've re-scaled the leather book.

 

[Tom Mann]

Rich54 - I'm too busy to try it at the moment, but I wonder how well content aware scaling would work on the leather area, with the circular image area re-inserted (ie, still as a circle) after its leather surroundings were scaled in one direction? It would be interesting to see how content aware scaling handles different images.

Tom M

 

[chrisdesign]

This is how I would do it.

 

[Tom Mann]

...and here's a quick try using content-aware scaling separately on the leather and on the insert.

T

 

[thePixelPixie]

Y'all are so awesome. THANK you. Soon after I'd posted, a friend of mine who is supposed to be a PhotoShop expert offered to help me with the project. So I didn't think I'd need your suggestions after all. However, he just messaged me to say that it's too complex for him. It's now up to me. And with all of your various suggestions, I feel confident I can manage this afterall. So THANK YOU again!

 

[thePixelPixie]

In case anyone's interested, here's what I wound up with. Quite a bit of copying elements in order to make them all work - mainly the ribs in the top portion. I'm kinda proud. But if anyone has any suggestions on how it could be further improved, I'm totally open.