Expand photo background to center the people in photo

[Woodsman]

I have Affinity Photo V1.9.

I have a photo of 2 people that I want to frame.

Problem is they are up pretty high in the picture and I wanted to expand the little bit of background that is above them a little further so that they appear a more centered in the picture.

 

Is there a way to do this in affinity photo??

 

Thanks very much in advance for any assistance.

[Alfred]

You can resize the canvas to allow for more background. To add the extra background at the top, set the anchor to bottom centre.

Depending on the nature of the background, filling in the extra space convincingly may take quite a bit of work, but the Clone Brush Tool and/or the Inpainting Brush Tool can often be helpful.

[RNKLN]

Or you can do the following:

• create extra background with help of the Cropping tool
• select transparent area via Select - Alpha Range - Select Fully Transparent
• fill the selected area via Edit - Inpaint

Depending on the original this can give some great result or something totally disappointing. Often it gives something in between, and then you can use the tools mentioned by Alfred to further optimise the result.

[Woodsman]

Thank you Alfred and RNKLN, really appreciate the help and courtesy of your responses. Thanks again.

[WallyEmm]

Thank you for that tip RNKLN, it worked well for me.  I have been using some old low resolution jpeg photos to get familiar with AP and had stitched some handheld shots using the Panorama function.  The Pano function did surprisingly well putting the mis-aligned photos together but there were some voids in the sky.  Your tip solved that problem in just a couple of clicks.  It was a mostly clear blue Utah desert sky with a few puffy white clouds, but the result was very nice.

Wally