Seam Carving: Finally a new Liquid to Our Images

Well it happened!!

The first time I got in contact with the new way of resizing the images I write it down and gave you all the details and a PDF file with lots of information about it.

It was Tuesday, 28 August 2007 and the article "New method to resize your images".

With lots of speculation on what this new way could serve us on this digital photography world and how could this apply to the way we enlarge images I follow closely the "evolution" of this new method that at the time got the name of Steam Carving For-Content Aware Image Resizing developed by the Vienna, Austria based husband-wife team of Ramin Sabet and Irmgard Sabet-Wasinger and is based on the work of Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir released at Siggraph in 2007.

Later on I made a another reference with some new videos and the new online available tryout on Monday, 1 October 2007 Seam Carving - Image resizing. A Dream that became true. I also made available to other platforms some links to some other cool products check them out. and here is the link to the online try out.

Today I found out this incredible and great news on a Press Release: onOne Software Announces Acquisition of Liquid Resize Technology onOne Software adds ground-breaking image resizing and re-targeting technology to its product offerings.

Portland, OR Janury 17, 2007 onOne Software, Inc., provider of world-class software solutions for professional photographers and graphic designers, announces today the technology acquisition of Liquid Resize which introduces a ground-breaking new way to resize images using a technique known as "seam carving" to reduce the distortion that typically occurs when manipulating the aspect ratio of an image.

"We're excited to have acquired this incredible new and unique image resizing technology to add to our award-winning line of Photoshop® plug-ins," said Craig Keudell, president of onOne Software. "This new technology that allows users to maintain the original aspect ratio of a digital image will provide photographers and graphic designers alike unprecedented control when they resize or adjust the composition of their images."

About Liquid Resize
Liquid Resize, a "content aware" image resizing application, was originally developed by the Vienna, Austria based husband-wife team of Ramin Sabet and Irmgard Sabet-Wasinger and is based on the work of Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir that made its first appearance in a video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qadw0BRKeMk) released at Siggraph 2007.

Liquid Resize will allow users to resize an image without the traditional geometric limitations while minimizing any distortion that would typically result from changing the original aspect ratio of an image.

Availability and Pricing
A free public beta of Liquid Resize for both Windows and Mac OS X users will be available in late January 2008 as a stand-alone application from the onOne Software Web site. A Photoshop plug-in version of Liquid Resize is expected to be available in the middle of 2008. Pricing has not yet been announced for the final version of Liquid Resize that will be released later in 2008.

About onOne Software

onOne Software develops time-saving software solutions for professional and advanced amateur photographers in the digital photography and graphic design industries. onOne Software solutions have been created to help photographers spend more of their time behind the camera taking pictures instead of the computer workstation. Such solutions include a wide range of easy-to-use plug-in enhancements for Adobe® Photoshop®, Photoshop® Elements and QuarkXPress®.

onOne Software delivers the highest quality software products to users by working with industry leaders and continuing to develop core technologies for professional photo and desktop publishing solutions on both Macintosh and Windows operating systems. Founded in 2005, onOne Software is a privately held company located in Portland, Oregon. For additional information, visit onOnesoftware.com.

Here is an Adobe sneak preview video from 3 months ago:



I think this says it all. In a couple of months we will be having a new resizing tool that will help us enlarge the size of our images without having to worry about the sensor size.

Maybe this way the sensor size battle between companies would decrease and they start to apply their knowledge on improving cameras functions and lowering their prices.

Here are some examples of what you can accomplish with this new toy:



It also seems that there are some more people creating software around this.

Take a look at this cool video that uses the same technique:



I think this will become very popular in a couple of months just like HDR did when people start to use it on their photos.

Google around for some more informations about this Seam Carving technique and you will find amazing stuff for both MAC and PC.

The open source version of the algorithm, Liquid Rescale Plugin for GIMP that is already available for Windows, OS X and Linux.

Check out, follow up and subscribe to the Flickr discussion group "Liquid Resize/Content-Aware Image Re-Sizing" also a lot of talking about this technique.