Adding Canvas in Photoshop

In this tutorial we are going to see how to add canvas around the image inside photoshop…

There are going to be times when you want to add some canvas around your image without changing the actual size of the image. This comes in handy if you want to add matte around all the sides of the image or you may be you want to add little blank space at the bottom into which you can type a text or whatever you want to add.

I am going to use this flower photo for this tutorial but feel free to use whatever image you like

Click to enlarge the photo

Now open this flower photo inside Photoshop by going to file + open

After opening the file you can change the canvas size by going up to the image menu and choose canvas size

Then the canvas dialog box opens like this

In the canvas size dialog box you want to make sure to check mark in Relative

Then type the amount of space which you want to add around your image into the width and the height fields. I am going to add 1 inch in the width and 1 inch in the height and make sure that the center box is highlighted in grey that tells the Photoshop to add a little bit of canvas on all four sides of the image

We can also choose which color is going to added around the image and we can do that by clicking the drop down menu of canvas extension color

In this we can choose from white, black and gray or whatever colors in the foreground or in the background color in the tool box

Or we can choose other, in this case color picker opens and we can choose whatever color we want

But for this tutorial ill choose the foreground color which is black and click ok

Now we have this nice even matte all the way around the picture and this is the end result

what if I want to have more space to the bottom to add a caption or title, then ill go back again to the image menu and choose canvas size again and this time with relative checked I am going to click the top middle square in the diagram that tells the Photoshop to add space only at the bottom not on the top or on the sides of the photo

After selecting the arrow the anchor diagram will look like this

Then I am not going to add any width just going to add 2 inch at the height field and going to leave the canvas color to black and click ok

This is how it looks after adding height to it

The important point is that I have added canvas around this image but I haven’t changed the image size and then we are ready to add whatever we like in this document in this case we can type some information about the photo.