Seam Carving technology

[Xhris]

I recently came across this website which, analogously to vectormagic for tracing, lets you use the recently developed seam carving technology (non-linear scaling) over the web.

Some interesting history for people: Dr. Ariel Shamir and Dr. Shai Avidan apparently came up with this technology. Believe it or not, Dr. Shai Avidan was recently hired by Adobe, and low and behold, the technology found its way into Photoshop CS4.

I find it hard to believe that this kind of technology wouldn't make its way into Xara given its fundamental significance to the graphics world, and I'm guessing sooner rather than later. The website version is pretty slow it has to be said, but you can bet that if it appears in Xara it will be ridiculously fast.

Hope people find it useful and complement Xara's functions.

[gwpriester]

This technology has been around for a while, I think Daniel Will Harris turned me on to it at least over a year ago.

It's not very analogous to Vector Magic because Vector Magic is a bitmap tracing application (now available as a stand alone product) and this product is a bitmap image scaling product. It's more analogous to Genuine Fractals, which is another excellent product for scaling photos upwards.

Off topic - I have just installed software for my APC Power Back-up unit that is really slowing down my computer and eating up available CPU. The software saves any open work if there is a power failure and the battery time expires. Anyway, it makes the ReSizr process even slower.

[michaelbuddy]

This technology could make its way into Xara. For several reasons.

1. Part or all of this technology from my understanding is open and usable. You don't have to use the online tool to take advantage of it. There's a standalone gui at google code.
http://code.google.com/p/seam-carving-gui/

2. Theres also a gimp plugin and I've used it. It's called liquid rescale It works well.
Gimp plugin link "Liquid Rescale"
http://registry.gimp.org/taxonomy/term/178

I think though that Adobe PS CS4 probably has a speed advantage, though I haven't used it yet. I'd bet they would work to speed it up faster than these free tools. It's fun to use it. I'm looking forward to when I need to use it. So far it's just been horsing around, but next graphical banner I have to make, I'll probably employ seam carving.

[Xhris]

Hi Gary, I meant both vector magic and this seam carving website offered useful features over the web for free. Well, at least VM used to be free. They are of course completely different in what they do. I couldn't save my image from that website when I last tried it for some reason.

[gwpriester]

Got it.

Vector Magic is no longer free. But they did use the web to generate a lot of interest in their product.

I also found out that by changing the version of the back up program to a Vista compatible one I can eliminate the CPU hogging problem.