Three pieces
The reasoning behind the chips in the rail
Every time you press a shape and pick a fill, the tool commits to an opinion about what belongs in a part of the picture nobody photographed. These three pieces are that opinion argued out at the length it actually needs, which is longer than a tooltip and shorter than a textbook.
What each one is for
They are meant to be read in the order below, though nothing stops you jumping. The first settles whether you are in the right place. The second is the one worth coming back to, because it is about the decision that decides whether a result looks built or looks taken. The third is a worked example rather than a principle, and it takes the conversion that asks more of a fill than the other six shapes put together.
- 1Grow the canvas, not the photoTwo operations that both end with a bigger file, told apart by what happens to the pixels you already had — and by which of the two you can undo afterwards.Start here if you are not certain this is the right tool
- 2Five ways to fill an edge that was never photographedMirror, stretch, blur, flat colour and gradient, taken one at a time: what each is arithmetically, the subjects it carries without anyone noticing, and the subjects it makes a fool of.Read this when a fill has gone wrong and you cannot say why
- 39:16 to 16:9, and why the answer is usually a blurOne conversion followed all the way through, with the numbers on screen: a 1,080-wide phone frame, 2,333 new columns, and the reason four of the five fills lose to the soft one here.Read this when the photo is tall and the slot is wide
What is deliberately not written up here
There is no piece on choosing a resolution, none on compression settings, and none on colour management, because none of those is a decision this tool asks you to make. The writing follows the controls. If a slider is not in the rail, the reasoning behind it is not on this page, and a general photography article dressed up as a guide would be padding wearing a hat.
There is also nothing here about the operations this site refuses. Stretching a photograph to a typed width, reaching a ratio by cutting, reconstructing detail in a small picture — those are real jobs with real answers, and the honest version of a guide about them is a sentence saying they happen elsewhere. You will find that sentence in the first essay, where it belongs, attached to the choice it affects.
How long they take
Six to nine minutes each, and every one of them ends at the tool rather than at another article. That is a deliberate shape: this is a site with one instrument on the front page, and a guide that leaves you reading a fourth guide has failed at the only thing it was for.