It's hard to get a picture just right, especially when using your iPhone to take snapshots. People move around, you sometimes have to deal with distracting stuff in the background, and there's always the chance that some stranger just walks past at just the time when you're tapping the shutter button. Fortunately, a German startup has come up with an app that can move individual elements of a picture around, resize them, or remove them entirely.
Liquid Scale does an analysis of the image on your phone, and detects the subject (or subjects) as opposed to the background. It then allows you to manipulate the subject and background separately. Those inconvenient pictures of you with an ex? Totally sanitized with this app. Seriously, I tried to use the "content aware image resizing" function of the app: edge detection can be sketchy unless there's sharp contrast between foreground and background, but you can manually select areas with ease.
In addition to the cool
National Enquirer style image editing where you get to remove people from a picture, the app is also useful for image resizing: keeping all the elements you want in a picture but crowding them together, with minimum distortion, in order to make a smaller image or change orientation from vertical to horizontal without losing anything. The way it all works is through what is called "seam carving:" following a high-gradient line to determine the edges of objects in an image and then "carving" them out of the background.
This is fairly sophisticated image processing for a mobile app, and while the quality of the result is not up to the level of the Content Aware Scaling function of Adobe Photoshop CS4, the price is also a lot lower -
$1.99 on the App Store.
#1
02-08-2010, 10:24 AM
lol
lol
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