rsizr your travel photos

The days are long gone when you needed photo editing software installed on your computer in order to perform simple tasks such as resizing or cropping a photo. Online services like wiredness, pixenate, phixr, snipshot and picnik allow you to upload your photos from your computer and perform those basic tasks in your browser without having to install as much as a plug-in.

Less than two weeks ago yet another service, rsizr, was added to the long list of online photo editing services, but this one is a bit different. rsizr allows you to crop and scale your photos like the other services, but it also allows you to resize your photos using seam carving, a new, smarter way of resizing.

Normally when you resize a photo, you make everything in the photo smaller. With seam carving, however, your photo gets analysed in order to identify the key areas of your photo. As the photo is being resized the less important areas are removed, leaving more room for the key areas in the final photo.

Seam carving sounded rather hocus-pocus to me at first, but rsizr makes child’s play of using this new technology with its retarget function. I uploaded the photo of a spider that I published a few days back, adjusted a few sliders, waited while rsizr created the seams and then dragged the photo to the size I wanted.

Here is the result:

The original photo prior to retargeting:

The photo after retargeting:

I then tried to achieve a similar resize by using two more traditional methods, scaling without maintaining proportions and cropping.

The photo after scaling without maintaining proportions:

The photo cropped to the same size:

As you can tell from the photos above, scaling without maintaining proportions unsurprisingly distorted the photo, whereas cropping the photo to the desired size meant losing more of the spider than was the case with retargeting.

Have a play with rsizr, it really is quite amazing what you can achieve with retargeting. If you want to learn more about seam carving Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir, the people behind the technique, have put together a video that explains it all.

TAGS: photos, rsizr, seam carving, travel

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