One onOne with Mike Wong: Liquid Resize Public Beta - Update 1/31/2008

One piece of software (Liquid Resize) using the image resizing method that's come to be called 'seam carving' or 'retargeted images' (that I wrote about here) is getting ready to be released to the public- first as a standalone piece of software, then later as a Photoshop plugin.

I really can't wait to play with this software, and I hope that the method or similar concepts becomes as ubiquitous in photo editing applications as the clone stamp is now - I use Paint.net as a free alternative to Photoshop, but I don't think that Photoshop plugins will work with anything but Photoshop. OK, actually I'm pretty darn sure that's the case. :-)

This is a powerful method that deserves more attention and, in my opinion, greater availability in the future for the average home scrapbooker or web designer to have access to. The blog talking about the beta release is below:
One onOne with Mike Wong: Liquid Resize Public Beta - Update 1/31/2008

As a side note, it's an interesting line here- a tool so powerful that the designers certainly deserve all the credit and monetary profit they can get from their ideas, but that is so useful that everyone really needs access to it. Hopefully the companies that hire(d) all the people that did the early work on this concept will be able to publish commercial software with it, make money on it, reward the people who brought the ideas in, then once it's an accepted and high-demand tool, it will proliferate into free software and they'll be able to move onto other amazing projects like this with the company's support. This tool needs to be out there, just not at the expense of the designer's investment of time and money returning to them empty. Unfortunately, the corporate world of today rarely works like that.

Update: Wikipedia's article on Seam Carving lists some links at the bottom of the page to tools that already offer this ability. I tried most of them (you're welcome) ;-) and found that Seam Carving GUI was by far the best solution. This is very cool technology, and you can bet I'll be using it extensively from here on out.