Extend Background with inpaint fill?

MW1887 · November 21, 2023

Like the title says I wanna extend my background with I guess inpaint fill?

I'm coming from Photoshop and just can't seem to get it to work. And no, I don't want just to stretch it, it's not the result I'm looking for.

For your information. I want to extend my background not to fully fit the new canvas but to make my rectangle photo squared.

I want something that works like this.

Edited November 21, 2023 by MW1887

carl123 · November 21, 2023

18 minutes ago, MW1887 said:

For your information. I want to extend my background not to fully fit the new canvas but to make my rectangle photo squared.

Affinity products do not have content aware fill (as yet) but that's a relatively new thing

Depending on your image there may be other ways to achieve what you want but we would need to see the image to determine what's best

MW1887 · November 21, 2023

@carl123 I want the photo to be squared and then add a blurry background behind it as a profile picture. I want same gap on all sides.

Edited November 21, 2023 by MW1887

GarryP · November 21, 2023

What, specifically, do you mean by “same gap on all sides”?

Is this the sort of thing you looking for?

MW1887 · November 21, 2023

@GarryP with gap I mean gap bewteen canvas and photo. Yours does look like what I want. How did u do that?

thomaso · November 21, 2023

Workaround (apart from Inpainting / Clone Tools): Copy the image –> crop it by a vector shape, if wanted with blurred edge (fx) –> stretch the copied image.
For non-horizontal/vertical edges within the image it may help to shear the copied image additionally.

For 'simple' backgrounds (e.g. gradient) it may be easier to create a new background object and entirely crop the original background of the image.

GarryP · November 21, 2023

Trying to ‘extend’ the trousers at the bottom of the image would probably be quite problematic, so best not to try unless you have a lot of skill and/or patience. I’ve a feeling that the Inpaintng Brush Tool may struggle with making something that looks good with that.

The process I used was:

Resize the image so that it’s the total height of the square canvas and position it horizontally centred.
Then use the Rectangular Marquee Tool to select a small rectangular portion of the ‘visible’ image on the left from top to bottom.
Copy, then Paste, then select the pasted layer and stretch it to the left so it ‘fills the gap’.
Do the same thing for the right-hand side but stretching to the right.
Use Merge Down to get a single layer.
Use the Inpainting Brush Tool over the ‘joins’ to make them look better.
Then maybe some touch-ups where things don’t look quite right.

A masked Live Gaussian Blur Filter may help to make the background a bit nicer too – to ‘take the edge off’ so to speak.

Or thomaso’s suggestions above may be better than mine, try them all and see which gives you something that you want.