Better Image Resizing: Seam Carving

You may have already seen this video (it's from mid-August) on resizing images in a more content-aware way: called "seam carving". If not, take a look.

I've shown that video to a few people over the last couple of weeks and nearly every one of them asked where they could get software to do that. The package that everyone points to is the GIMP plugin "liquid resize".

The only problem with pointing people over to that plugin is that it's not exactly obvious that it shows up under the "Layer" menu in GIMP. Similarly non-obvious is exactly how to use it to get the best results.

If you just fire away, you don't get the benefits of preserving people's faces, for example. Instead, you get a distorted image that's little better than if you had just resized it and ignored the proportions.

Fortunately, a tutorial for using the liquid resize plugin landed in my RSS reader this morning and I thought I'd share.

Oh, and, for the record, while GIMP is typically run on Linux, you CAN run it on Windows as well. Just make sure you run the GTK installer before the GIMP installer (both on the site).

If you don't like the results that the GIMP plugin gives you, take a look at this other implementation of the idea or wait for Photoshop to integrate it (they hired the guy from the video).