A simple and fun technique for Photoshop Elements

While playing with my photos today I taught myself how to remove a large empty space from a photo. My picture had items in the foreground then a large area that was empty before there was more in the distance. Closing up the empty space makes a great difference. Here is how it is done.
My picture started out looking like this

From the menu bar, click on Image>Recompose.
Nothing appears to have happened - but at the bottom of the screen there are two new controls

By default, when you touch the picture you will find you have a brush that allows you to paint over the parts of the photo that you do not want to damage. If there are people in the picture, be sure to touch each and every one or they could end up distorted! This is how I touched the parts I wanted to keep safe.

Now you need to click on the lower brush - the one with the minus sign beside it - to show which part or parts of the image you do not mind losing.

Once again I used a freehand line to mark the width of sand I wanted to remove.
I then clicked outside of the picture and this gave me the crop bounding box - you can see the nodes on the image above,
I then left mouse clicked on the centre bottom node and pushed the node upwards.

At the bottom of the image appeared the usual two symbols that you chose to accept the change or cancel. I selected the "check" symbol. When the bottom of the picture was pushed upwards the areas that were covered with green did not alter their shape at all. I did notice that the blank area of sky at the top was compressed even though I had not indicated one way or the other what I wanted to happen there.
The picture now has a transparent space that needs to be removed. So the next action is to use the regular crop tool.

When the crop boundary is exactly where you want it, left mouse click  the "Check" mark.
If you glance across at the Layers Palette you will notice that the image is now a layer. This means that it needs to be "Flattened" before it can be saved as a "jpg".

To flatten an image either go to the Menu bar and click on Layer>Flatten Image or in the Layers palette right click on the layer and left click on Flatten Image .
This technique can be used vertically as well as horizontally and the results are quite amazing! You have to try it!
AJ