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Find out more about Jason: Jason Brooks is executive editor of eWEEK Labs, and has been testing and writing about technology since 1999. He is a big fan of Linux and open source, and has personally witnessed Bill Gates tearing it up on a Comdex dance floor. |
About a year ago, at SIGGRAPH 2007, researchers Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir presented a paper on content-aware image resizing--a method for resizing (and removing objects from) images without distorting them too much.
In a nutshell, the software identifies low-information seams within an image, and cuts out (or multiplies) those seams in order to decrease or increase the image's size without changing too drastically the meat of the image.
Avidan and Shamir produced an explanatory video on the technique, which I've embedded below. If you haven't yet seen this video, I recommend you check it out.
After I saw this video, I wished that my image editing program of choice, the Gimp, could be made to perform this trick. Fortunately, it wasn't long before a content-aware resizing plugin for the Gimp appeared, complete with support for identifying parts of an image to discard.
The plugin, called Liquid Rescale, is easy (and free) to acquire, and it's pretty straightforward to use, as well. Here's how to do it.
Step One: Bring out the Gimp
GIMP, which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, is an open source application that's similar in function to Photoshop. I use the Gimp for all of my image manipulation needs.
Step Two: Get the Plugin
Step Three: Use the Plugin

I've found that the Liquid Rescale plugin usually works fairly well, but results vary from image to image. In this beach image example, the lines of surf on either side of the dog I've cut out don't quite match up, and there's a visible seam where the dog had been. I found that a bit of judicious smudging helped matters. Also, I've found that in order to completely excise certain parts of an image, I've had to fiddle with the "Strength" slider.