Filed under: Beta Beat, Graphic Design
Adobe demos Photoshop CS4's content-aware scaling
In a QuickTime screencast, Adobe's Russell Brown demonstrates content-aware scaling, a feature of Photoshop CS4, due to be released this month.
A lower-resolution YouTube demo from Lynda.com is available here, if you don't want to download a huge QuickTime movie. The content is different, but you'll get the idea.
Adobe licensed an algorithm that senses "dead" areas in photos, and resizes the image to avoid squashing or stretching every object.
In the video, Brown demonstrates resizing an image of four golfers, interactively removing space between and around the golfers, but leaving the golfers' proportions correct. He also demonstrates resizing a Volkswagen bus, making it a more "economical" size, but automatically keeping the wheels round.
For those looking for a compelling reason to upgrade to Photoshop CS4, this might be it. If not, what is? Let us know by leaving a comment.
[Via Swissmiss and Michael Sippey.]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Commodore Guff said 5:15PM on 10-09-2008
The GIMP's had this for a while now: http://liquidrescale.wikidot.com/en:examples
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Josh said 5:19PM on 10-09-2008
It was licensed from the creator of the GIMP plugin... it's the same algorithm.
required said 11:41AM on 10-11-2008
And I've had a plug-in filter that does this for awhile now:
http://www.humansoftware.com/pages1200/XFile/HSxfil0.html
Mike said 5:32PM on 10-09-2008
I can have 2 golfers, 3 golfers or even 4!!!! omgwtfgtfoohwtb! ...golfers
Dude needs to get out more..
but seriously pretty cool feature
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Picazsoo said 5:52PM on 10-09-2008
How about totally smooth zooming on the pictures. Ability to create seamless 360 degree panoramas and export them to be viewed in flash? How about being able to take let's say 10 macro pictures of an object with a pretty shallow depth of field and then automaticaly have them composed into one with much deeper depth of field. Or FINALLY being able to change the width and hardness of a brush simply by holding certain combination of modifier keys and scrolling the mouse wheel. Those are pretty cool functions I think.
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Ted said 5:59PM on 10-09-2008
Who needs Photoshop for that? :-P
http://www.flickr.com/photos/echo_29/91551597/
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mex said 1:28AM on 10-10-2008
Great man! :D
dh. said 6:27PM on 10-09-2008
Here is another implementation which works in mac os x:
http://code.google.com/p/seam-carving-gui/
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yargo said 6:41PM on 10-09-2008
I've had every version of Photoshop since 2.0. This will be the very first version that I will not purchase. Maybe it's because Photoshop does everything I need it to do right now - or maybe it's because there are no new features that make it a "must have".
I think it's both.
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bac said 6:51PM on 10-09-2008
probably based on the "seam carving" work done by Shavi Avidan & Ariel Shamir, which was presented at Siggraph last year
see:
http://www.seamcarving.com/
also an interactive demo here:
http://swieskowski.net/carve/
oh, I didn't notice the post at the top about GIMP - indeed it's the same algorithm there as I mention here...
interestingly, the same guys have done some work on applying seam carving to video(!)
http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~rubinst1/pub/vidret/
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BT said 7:06PM on 10-09-2008
I think I'll skip this version. The new features don't scream to me. But then again, Smart Objects seemed useless until I tried them out a few times.
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mex said 1:29AM on 10-10-2008
Smart objects are totally usefull! Especially when you design GUIs with one recursive object... like buttons lets say...
Grant H said 7:31PM on 10-09-2008
For someone that has used this first hand on the pre-release team, I have to warn you not to expect miracles, this is the first implementation of the feature and by no means will it be left as is, there is much room for improvement.
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Roger said 8:14PM on 10-09-2008
What is wrong with that guy?
So annoying!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SHUT UP!!!
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Brendan said 11:24AM on 10-10-2008
Agreed. I couldn't make myself sit thru the entire thing, because it was so obnoxious. I felt he was treating me like a kindergartener, at which point I skimmed thru the video.
Squid7085 said 11:30PM on 10-09-2008
Pretty damn cool feature, something I would have been able to use in the past a few times. However, I don't think its worth the upgrade cost.
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Information Central said 1:47AM on 10-10-2008
Adobe needs to spend less time dicking around with gimmicks and more time (ANY time) fixing glaring defects and interface problems. For example, its updaters, which inexplicably fail more often than not on the Mac. If you can't write a simple file-copy routine or patcher in 2008, you should get out of the business.
Then there are huge functionality gaps: There's no way to print across multiple pages in Photoshop. WTF? For years, apologists excused Photoshop's piss-poor UI and nonsensical defaults by saying "well, it was designed for the PRINT marketplace." That doesn't hold water when you look at the lack of multi-page output and its wretched color previewing.
And Illustrator is simply unusable at this point. People have written scripts to address major missing functions, and yet there's no way to assign a script to a hotkey. The selection method is garbage. It's worth running Windows under Fusion or Parallels just to run Corel Draw and avoid Illustrator.
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razzi said 4:12AM on 10-10-2008
Rsizr does the same (and for free). See the article (in Dutch) here: http://www.razziphoto.com/2008/09/23/gratis-content-aware-scaling/
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Jash Sayani said 7:46AM on 10-10-2008
I am happy with CS 3 !! Cant keep upgrading for every update....
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Josue said 10:31AM on 10-10-2008
Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab were the ones who developed for the first time this kind of software algorithm. For one deeper explanation on how this works visit http://rsencion.blogspot.com/2007/08/image-resizing.html
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