I was browsing digg this morning and ran across what I think might be the most amazing, free web tool available today for photo editing. This web application is called Rsizr and is very similar to the "seam carving" tool I saw demo'd at Robert Scoble's blog (you can see the original demo of that tool here.
Rsizr is a free, online, flash application that lets you resize JPG, PNG, and GIF images. With rsizr, you can process normal, image rescaling and cropping as well as resizing images using a new image resizing algorithm called seam carving (a method of image retargeting) that tries to keep intact areas in your image that are richer in detail.
VIDEO SCREENCAST OF RSIZR IN ACTION
To get the full "picture" of how cool this is, check out the screencast video I made this morning. In this screencast I'll first stretch a photo from a normal 4x6 shape to a more panoramic size. Then in the second part of the video I'll take a standard sized photo of a schooner ship and stretch the photo to a panoramic-shaped photo while keeping the ship in it's original proportions (i.e. just stretch everything around the ship without stretching the ship itself).
Part 1 of this video screen-cast shows just stretching a photo in width.
Part 2 of the video shows me highlighting the ship in the picture (the part I want to maintain dimensions) and then stretching the rest of the photo.
These are just two examples of what you can do with this application on-the-fly.
EXAMPLE BEFORE & AFTER PHOTOS OF RESIZR
Here's an example of taking a photo with several people and removing one person from the picture and then stitching the end result with little effort:
Notice there are only two kids in the picture to the right.
This is the first release of Rsizr so it likely will have trouble keeping up with the traffic it will undoubtedly receive this week (it's that cool). I'll be excited to see what they do with their next few versions. One thing I would like to see for this site is a little demo of how to use each of the tools. I'm slowly figuring them out, but it would certainly help new users out.
Read more about Rsizr at their site here
See more example photos in their gallery
Check out the Complete Flickr Hacks, Applications & Scripts Database