I took this picture of a solitary mangrove tree in the early morning hours before the wind came up and spoiled the reflection. I was concentrating on getting as big of a picture as I could while eliminating other distractions from the sides and background. I ended up with a picture that I like a lot except for the fact that I did not get enough space around the mangrove to really set it off and give the feel of it being all alone.
Here is the pic:
(Sony a77ii, Tamron 150-600, 460mm # f6.3, Iso 800, edits in LR CC to bring up exposure and tweak colors a bit)
So I believe what I want to do is "add canvas", but I am not confident of my capabilities with the technique so that I don't lose the rippled water effect at the bottom. I tried doing it but it looked fake.
So the question is: Is it fixable, and if so what exactly would you do? If you don't mind spelling it out for me, it would be very much appreciated.
Hi Andrew, this frame has rather clean edges, so yes, it is a good candidate to add canvas. All I did was Image>Canvas size, made sure "relative" was checked, and added canvas to both height and width. I then used the rectangular marquee, set the style to "regular, and filled in the added canvas by using it with Content Aware. As an added bonus it did a really decent job with the ripples below. I also cleaned up the darker smudges above by using the clone tool, but a belter job can be done using a larger file.