I am working on some things that may or may not see being added to the production environment here on Photoblog.

The first big one is content aware image resizing. I saw a great video on youtube about it and found some people that were interested in making a open sourced version of it. The basic concept of it is that instead of cropping a image to make it smaller it will remove the least noticeable pixels of a image to make it smaller.

So here is an example starting image


Here is the resized image can you see what got removed?


So here is another example. I will preserve the data from the firepit and bench to make sure no pixel data is removed


The final result is pretty good, and I turned it into a square


I am thinking of offering this as a free service to anyone, not just Photoblog members. It can use a lot of resources which is the reason it might not see the light of day. Plus I have to figure out a way to let members paint on an image to let the program know what they want to remove.

I am also working on something that you can find like images. Say you like images of sunsets and 3000 other members have pictures of sunsets but no one tags them or puts sunset in the entry text. So search does not work. Well this application will read the data from images to get like images from the image data not what is put for tags or entry text.

I am also doing a lot of back end work to make the site faster and scalable for future growth since we are growing fast.

The thing is that you scale its LENGHT to about 60 % of its original size. I better not posting my picture if someone ruins my photo like that. And when it comes to resize-ing ( or maybe i should call it stretching it to 60%) picture of people, the face and the proportion will be a mess!

gatotjakatimur: That's not how it works, it is "content aware" resizing and resampling, it is more than just scaling, in fact, it is almost distortion free.

See here for more info.

mike: that is great news. After seeing this a week or so back, I was wondering when someone was going to create a version that non-dev folks could use (kind of like Auto-stitch) I am glad someone is looking into it. Thanks for everything!

It's not distorsion free : look at the 1st sample
proportions of before/after pics are different.
So I hope this service will remain optional !!!!!!!!!!

Correct, it is "almost distortion free" as opposed to "fully distorted to scale" as mentioned in the first post. Aside from the tree branch, and the removed rock, I really don't see much un-natural distortion. You would get similar results from using a 100mm lens to take the photo, vs. a 24mm lens. The examples might not be high resolution images, but I still think you would be hard pressed to find distortion in the leaves, sky, or water ripples, this is what the system focuses on eliminating when rescale/resampling.

There are also some tools that let you identify what is important and not to be touched (scaled) which is what Mike meant by needing a way to allow us to paint on the image, it is used to both remove and protect areas of importance.

What I showed won't be part of the upload process. It will be a completely separate part of the site. Think of it as a way to retouch a photo before an upload. Say you want to remove background items that you can't crop out or don't have the editing skills to do it in say Gimp or Photoshop.

Yes they are not distortion free. I hope we can better tune the algorithms to make it choose better pixels paths.

cmiper: there is a gui you can use that I'm attempting to help with

http://gabeiscoding.com/

He has a opensource project on going that provides a gui for windows people to use.

Phewww... well I guess I don't have to worry about someone that will remove a wheel or two from the car that i took a photo at. Without knowing its true picture, someone may not notice what is missing.

Well I agree with henri05, and I'm pretty relieved that this is only a LINK in this blog.

I see the point about making a 100mm lens looks like a 24 and I realize that something would look interesting by playing some distorting angle. But something that really bothers me the most is the REMOVING THINGS.

The "removing things" is an "option" if you choose to do so. resizing/resampling is the main feature, with removing and preserving as the sub-features (options) as you resize. If you watch the video posted above you will get a decent idea of how it works and what it is capable of. I wish I had the original article on this, it had lots of FAQs covered in it...I will look..it.

Mike,
This is a good idea and a nice option to have. Just to save you a bit of effort, I read on Gizmodo today that Adobe are working on a internet-based version of Photoshop that can do some basic editing, cropping and tweaking. I know these kinds of services already exist but a Photoshop version will probably have a lot more clout.

You want to wait until it comes out and see what's offered.

Cheers

photoshop does not do seam carving though. What I did was not a crop or tweaking.

I just made the area I want to remove red and run a program and it will find the best path to remove pixel data and focus to find a path what is highlighted in red. You can see cmiper's video link and look how powerful it can be.

check out picnik.com
it's a free online photo editor

mike,

i'm not so sure i see the painpoint about this - but do you think there is a big need for this function?

i know that some people still just upload their picture from their digicam directly to the internet without ever looking at it with a photo editing program (there's free stuff out there and even online stuff like http://www.picnik.com as mentioned above), but honestly that's THEIR problem and most people here seem to have discovered the simple art of cropping/editing a picture anyway. so why bother with such a function - which btw is only ONE arbitrary way to make a picture motive more interesting?

sometimes what's possible is not what's needed.

my 2cents to your otherwise still completely and utterly rocking photoblog,
michael