Ever since the Content-Aware Image Resizing presentation at SIGGRAPH 2007, there has been excitement around finally getting to play with the underlying software. Some developers have gone so far as to implement their own version of the techniques described in the paper by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir.

Yesterday, I saw a post on Digg about to one such implementation: the Liquid Rescale GIMP plugin by Carlo Baldassi.

So I’ve installed The GIMP (an open source image editing software similar to Photoshop) and tried out Liquid Rescale on a some images from Flickr:

Original (Photo by Chuq Von Rospach)

80% width

50% width

45% width, 80% height

The plugin is in early stages, so there is currently no way to select areas of importance. That means people sometimes get mangled:

Original (Photo by Boltronic)

80% width

Even though they’ve hired Shai Avidan, Adobe hasn’t confirmed that the technique will make its way into Photoshop. However, it will be interesting to see third-party implementations grow and become more optimized.