Seam Carving in Adobe Photoshop CS4
[UPDATE] It has been confirmed that Seam carving is indeed part of Photoshop Extended CS4. Read my review of Adobe Creative Suite 4 here.
On Monday, 8 September, 2008, Adobe announced in the Adobe Photoshop World Keynote that they hired Shai Avidan, co-creator of Seam Carving (also called Content-Aware Image Resizing). Presumably, Adobe intends to integrate Seam Carving as an image transformation option in Adobe Photoshop CS4. This feature will be the single most impressive technological upgrade to Photoshop’s feature set since the introduction of Layers in Photoshop 3.0 (wow, I’ve been using Photoshop since 1994. Time flies…).
What is Seam Carving?
The simplest way to non-uniformly resize an image is to either crop it or to cut rows/columns out of it. To make the edit as seamless as possible one needs to remove the least important, lowest-transient columns or rows. Unfortunately, no matter how hard you try, just cutting straight rows/columns out of an image almost invariably result in obvious distortion artifacts.
Instead of cutting straight rows or columns out of an image, Seam Carving uses dynamic programming algorithms to determine the least noticeable paths from one side of an image to another, called seams, and cuts the image along those seams. These paths are not straight, like a row or column, but rather, they naturally follow the contours of the content in the image. This is why the technique is sometimes called Content Aware Image Resizing.
Seam Carving is to bitmap images what Granular Synthesis in Ableton Live is to audio: a way to make your images “elastic,” easily allowing the designer to adjust your proportion and composition in ways that previously required tremendous expertise with the Clone tool. Getting your composition to balance perfectly within the Golden Ratio will become easier than ever!
Explaining it in words doesn’t do it justice. Watch this video to really understand what the technology is.
Excited yet? If you’re a designer you should be. The world’s best bitmap editor is about to get a whole lot better.
Tags: IdentityMine
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21 November, 2008 at 8:02 pm
[...] Creative Suite 4 Changes The Game Earlier this year I wrote a post speculating that Adobe intended to add content aware resizing A.K.A. “seam carving” to [...]