Liquid Rescale GIMP Plugin

Liquid rescale is a GIMP plugin that intelligently resizes an image without losing those parts that are important.

It uses a technology called image re-targeting - algorithmically determine which areas of the image are important and then delete other areas retaining those which are important.

Liquid rescale GIMP plugin is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. However it is not included in the default set of plugins shipped with GIMP. So to start using the Liquid rescale plugin, you have to first install it separately.

Liquid rescale plugin can be installed in most Linux distributions using their respective package management tools.

If you are using Fedora Linux, you can install the Liquid rescale plugin using Yum as follows.

$ su -c 'yum install gimp-lqr-plugin'

After you have installed the plugin, you can access it via GIMP menu - Layer > "Liquid rescale..." as shown in the image below.

For further details on how to use the plugin, please visit the Liquid Rescale Plugin home page.

Image Retargeting - A new technology to display images on the web

Displaying images on the web is always a case of walking the fine line between optimizing the image for the web and making sure the image doesn't lose its clarity or its intended purpose. There are two ways of resizing an image which is popularly used by web masters and lay persons alike. They are cropping an image and scaling an image to the desired size. The former method will most possibly end with the image losing its fine details where as using the latter method will reduce the image's clarity.

Now it seems a new method of resizing an image has been demonstrated by two Israeli professors, Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir which ensures that the image retains both its functionality as well as its clarity. This method is called re-targeting. The idea is to algorithmically determine which areas of the image are important and then delete other areas retaining those which are important.

Re-targeted vs cropped vs scaled image.

At present none of the graphics suites including Photoshop and Gimp provide tools to re-target an image. Perhaps if this new algorithm (or method) is released under an open license, we could see this functionality being incorporated in Gimp in the future. It is popularly known as 'Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing'.

For now watch this Youtube video which explains this interesting process in more detail.