gantico.com/en

Finally I tried Seam carving (friendly called “Liquid resize”, “content aware scaling” or “intelligent image resizing”), the currently most buzzed technique for image post-production. It allows you to resize a picture “non uniformly while preserving their features, i.e. avoiding distortion of the important parts“. It fascinates you immediately, it seems magic, but it’s true and it works!

I thought that it could have been a thing for the future, but there are already some implementations of the original algorithm described in this paper by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir. I played with the fancy Flash version on-line, and it didn’t take a lot of time for making me scream a big “WOOOOWWWW”!

You can compare here my testing picture before and after. I just painted with “remove brush” on Lorenzo and he disappeared automatically when I resized the image. {Edit Nov 13} I added another variation with Lorenzo preserved: it was made painting with “preserve brush” before resizing.

In case you missed it, have a look at the demo on YouTube, but if you want to experiment it with your hands, try rsizr.com: upload a picture and have fun! There was also a photo contest for resized pictures, but you can still send your images for the glory and maybe a t-shirt!

If you want to try it outside of the browser, here you are a some options:
● a plug-in for Photoshop (Windows, Mac in 2008), free trial, complete version: $95
● an open source plug-in for GIMP (Windows or Linux), free
● a full standalone application (Windows or Linux), free

PS
Adobe recently hired Shai Avidan…

{ Added Nov 20 }
Adobe just hired also Ariel Shamir and there are cool news for research in video application, as described in this article from Cnet: ‘Seam carving’ photo resizing now for video