Expand your images

Crop outside your frame in Photoshop and discover a clever hack for detailed Al-generated fills with James Paterson

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With all the fanfare about text-to-image generators, there's one AI feature that can often be overlooked. However, it's arguably the most useful AI tool for photographers and one that, even though it employs AI to generate new pixels, somehow doesn't feel like cheating in the way that prompt generators do.

Tucked away in the Photoshop Crop tool settings is the option to crop with 'Generative Expand'. This allows us to crop outside the original bounds of our image and let Photoshop fill in the area by employing Firefly, its AI generator. For me, this is the most useful implementation of generative AI in any Adobe program.

Perhaps you're looking to correct a crop that went slightly awry at the time of shooting, or maybe you need some extra negative space to add text or design elements to the image. How about giving the subject a bit more breathing space? Maybe you accidentally chopped off the end of a person's foot, or perhaps you just want to fix a wonky horizon without losing chunks of your image. In these situations and many more, Generative Expand can be brilliant.

For this project, we'll explore all the key features and show you a neat trick for getting higher-quality results.

1 Crop with Expand