Portrait to Landscape

[Guest]

How do you change a picture from portrait to landscape in Photoshop CS5?

[Noel Carboni]

Short answer:  the Crop Tool.

Is your question more involved than this?

-Noel

[Guest]

I am new to Photoshop CS5, so could you give me details on how to do that?

[Noel Carboni]

Choose the Crop Tool in the tools panel.  Drag a box around the parts of the image you want to keep.

-Noel

[Trevor.Dennis]

Is this a blank Canvas?  In which case Image > Image Rotation > 90° CW

If a picture, then as Noel says, use the crop tool.  With the Crop tool selected there is a drop down box from which you can choose precise aspect ratios.

But...  There is another, more elegant, and far more powerful way to do it.  Content Aware Scale

You could just copy the BG  to a new layer, and use Free Transform to squash it up into a narrower Portrait mode aspect ratio.  but with CAS you can select thos parts of the image you want to remain un squashed, and save the selection.  Then:

• Ctrl a (selevct the entire canvas)
• Edit > Content Aware Scale
• Towards the right of the Options bar use the Protect drop down, and choose the selection you previously saved.
• Now squash the image by draging the center left or center right handles towards the middle of the image.

This was taken five years ago with a Canon 30D, so not that flash an image.

But a competition judge suggested it might look better as a portrait mode image, so I used the above technique to produce this:

You'll notice that the interesting rock as retained its aspect ratio.