I heard about seam carving a few weeks ago, but I didn’t think it would be available to the public for months. Well, I was wrong. Rsizr (We’re so Web 2.0! We hate vowels!), a free web-based seam carving program is out now. There are some others, most notably Picutel, a PC-only program that sells for $99. Hooray. What heck is seam carving?
From Wikipedia: “Seam carving is an image resizing algorithm developed by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir. This algorithm alters the dimensions of an image not by scaling or cropping, but rather by intelligently removing (or adding) pixels from the image that carry little importance. The importance of a pixel is generally measured by its contrast when compared with its neighbor pixels. Seam carving can also be run in reverse by adding pixels along the lowest energy seam.”
So, this algorithm looks for uncomplicated places in a photo (sky, blurry background, etc.) and eliminates or adds them as the photo dimensions are changed. To put it even more simply, the algorithm alters reality.
Because I am a sufferer of Shiny Kit Syndrome, I was in awe for the first few seconds of the video demonstration, but then I started thinking about what this means for photojournalism. I predict more than a few discussions between photo staffs and copy desks about why we can’t just seam carve all the dead space out of an image to make it better fit the page.
Also, Dr. Avidan, was hired by Adobe right after he and his research partner released the demo video, which means that the unethical photojournalists photomanipulators out there will soon have one more tool to make their lives easier.
