Make a portrait photo landscape

Somebody has asked you for a landscape picture and what you have is a tall one. The instinct is to crop, and the instinct is usually wrong: cropping a portrait photo to a landscape shape throws away most of its height, which on a photograph of a person is most of the person. This page reaches the same shape from the other side.

The top and bottom edges stay exactly where they are. New columns appear left and right until the frame is the proportion you asked for, and the five fills decide what those columns contain. Your photograph is then laid over the top at its own size, at whole-number coordinates, and nothing in it is scaled, softened or shifted.

The rule of thumb for choosing a fill is what the edges of your photograph are made of, not what the middle is. A picture with sky, sea, foliage or a plain wall running out to the frame extends beautifully — mirror it or stretch it and nobody will look twice. A picture with a doorframe, a horizon of buildings, a line of text or somebody standing against the edge does not, and a blur is the way to keep it dignified.

What this page will not do is reconstruct the room. There is no model here inventing the rest of the scene, because a model small enough to run in a tab is a several hundred megabyte download that fails on the exact subjects you would want it for. The five fills are arithmetic on pixels you already have, they take a few milliseconds, and they work on every device that can open the page.

Which landscape shape should I choose?

It depends entirely on where the picture is going, and the chips are ordered so the common ones are first. 3:2 is what this page opens on: it is the proportion most cameras shoot and the one a printed photograph is usually ordered at, and it asks for the least new material of any landscape shape. 16:9 suits anything destined for a screen or a video. 21:9 is a banner shape and will build three quarters of the finished file, which is a lot to ask of a blur.

Is this the same as rotating the photo?

No, and the difference catches people out. Rotating turns the picture on its side, so a person standing up ends up lying down. This keeps everything upright and changes the shape of the frame around it. If your photo genuinely came out of the camera the wrong way round, that is a rotation job and a different one from this.

How much of the result will actually be my photograph?

The figure under the canvas tells you, and it updates as you change the target. Going from a typical phone portrait to 3:2 leaves you with about half of what you see being the original; 16:9 leaves about a third. Anything much past that and you are no longer expanding a photograph, you are making a background with a photograph in the middle — which is fine if that is the intention, and worth knowing if it is not.