If you have a beautiful photo that isn’t as wide as you’d like it to be, and you understandably don’t want to fix it by stretching, then you are in the right place.
Duplication is the key to converting a square or vertical image into a horizontal format, or in other words, portrait to landscape.
Essentially, we are going to create new pixels from existing ones, and add them to the sides of the image, expanding its width in the process.
Depending on the composition of your photo, you can achieve a horizontal format with duplicate pixels in one of two ways, both of which we’ll explore with you below.
Making a medium distance photo horizontal
The empty space around objects in a photo is called negative space. It’s an important concept in professional photography because it helps the viewer focus on the main subject.
If you take a picture of an aeroplane in the sky on a clear day, the blue sky surrounding the plane is the negative space. Likewise, the floor and wall surrounding this bed and bedside table are negative space:
They tend to be wide open areas and, crucially, don’t have as much detail or variation as the objects they surround. This means we can duplicate them without causing the image to look or feel unnatural.
Since we want to increase the width of an image to make it more horizontal, we need to find negative space on the left or right side, or both. And it needs to be a full-length block of negative space, like the highlighted area shown here:
Photos shot from a medium distance don’t give us much room to play with in terms of negative space, so you may have to work with blocks which are far narrower than the one shown here.
Now that we have identified a vertical block of negative space on the right-hand side of the image, we can copy and paste it, and then drag it next to the original block so as to begin expanding the width.
However, we can’t leave the block as it is, otherwise the block edges will be visible and therefore it will be obvious to everyone that we are using duplicated blocks.
The final step is to flip every other block horizontally. This will create a mirror effect between each block, causing the edges to disappear out of view, and leaving us with a cohesive finish.
We were fortunate that the skirting board (also called a baseboard) was perfectly straight. Had the photo been taken from an angle, we probably wouldn’t have been able to pull off the mirroring effect.
Indeed, an angled skirting board would have created a zigzag effect as we added and mirrored our blocks, which ruins the realism. So keep an eye out for lines that people expect to appear straight.
This is precisely why the method works really well for pictures of nature: everything in nature is organically shaped, such as the ripples in the water in this picture:
We can mirror the water ripples on both sides of the image, and nothing will look amiss or unnatural. It only starts to look weird if you add too many duplicate blocks and a repetitive pattern emerges—know when to stop!
How many blocks you need depends on how wide you want your photo to be. Just remember that each new block must mirror the previous one and everything will join up nicely.
It’s the exact same method for creating vertical images, except that we are adding blocks to the sides to expand the width. To achieve a vertical format, you would expand the length by adding blocks to the top & bottom.
Duplicating negative space leaves you with a lot more negative space than you started with, which is why this method is super useful when you need space for adding text to your images.
So, that’s how you deal with close-up or medium shot photos. If you are editing a long shot photo, you’re going to have an easier time making the conversion to horizontal.
Making a long shot photo horizontal
The bed and bedside table in our previous example took up a considerable amount of space, leaving us with only a narrow block of negative space to work with, and it was the same with the picture of the duckling.
But in the case of long shot photos, whereby the subject is dwarfed by its environment, you can get away with duplicating negative space along with other objects and details, so long as it makes sense.
You’ve probably seen many a photo that has followed the famous compositional guideline called the rule of thirds. This is where the main subject is off-center, like the bird in this picture:
Long shot photos with this composition give us a lot of space to duplicate at once, even if it contains additional details such as the rocks in the foreground and the buildings in the background.
We can go ahead and duplicate half the image, flip it horizontally, and tack it on the left side of the photo.
We have successfully converted the portrait photo into landscape with a single duplicate block and mirrored it. It’s not obvious that we duplicated the buildings because of how distant they are, and the rocks are organically shaped anyway.
Also note that it’s harder to realize that the image has been mirrored when the whole image isn’t symmetrical.
Summary
The only way to create a horizontal image without stretching it is by duplicating blocks on either or both sides, while remembering to flip every other block so they mirror each other.
Medium distance photos are a challenge, because every detail is under heavy scrutiny, unlike long shot photos, whereby you can duplicate as much as half the image without raising any eyebrows.
Try not to disturb the sense of realism when choosing areas to duplicate, and be wary of non-straight lines or angled lines as they can look really awkward when mirrored.