Have you ever taken a picture which would be just great only if you could remove that strange unwanted object that showed up in the middle of nowhere and now kills the whole effect? Or perhaps you just want to get rid of your ex-girlfriend and keep the photo with a fantastic landscape alone? Whatever your secret plans are, GIMP Liquid rescale plugin is there for you. Just use it!

Author: Korneliusz Jarzebski

Recently there has appeared a short movie presenting abilities of Seam Carving program. In the movie you can see an absolutely new rescaling process of digital images. Shortly it can be described as cutting-out and adding less significant lines. This method of rescaling was developed by two Israeli scientists: Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir, who called it the Content Aware Image Resizing.

Similar method is used in the Internet to format web sites, where the webmaster with help of special tags can divide the site to blocks and set the appropriate size of each one to make it work with the text-wrapping. So far such process was unavailable for images and solution that does it, often loses details which can be important.

One day I’ve come across the plugin that adds this rescaling method to GIMP. The effects are quite surprising.

Standard usage

Liquid Scaler perfectly suits as a tool for rescaling only one dimension, eg. width. The algorithm of the process tries to isolate and preserve the aspect ratio of distinguishing parts of the image. Shortly spoken it processes only this parts that are not so important. Let’s try it on the image representing two men walking on the beach.

Liquid Scaler perfectly suits as a tool for rescaling only one dimension, eg. width. The algorithm of the process tries to isolate and preserve the aspect ratio of distinguishing parts of the image. Shortly spoken it processes only this parts that are not so important. Let’s try it on the image representing two men walking on the beach.

Standard Bicubic Scaler

Liquid Scaler

Isn’t it surprising? Let’s try on the another image.

Standard Bicubic Scaler

Liquid Scaler

What if Liquid fails?

Sometimes happens that the rescaling process will fail and the result won’t suit your expectations because the proportions hasn’t been preserved sufficiently.

Standard Bicubic Scaler

Liquid Scaler

Looking carefully at the picture you can see that those people’s proportions hasn’t been perfectly preserved. In this case you can use the quick mask which serves as the protection on the marked region.

Applying mask layer

Much better result with Liquid Scaler

Protective layer? Let’s try to invert it!

The imposed protective layer can be used to remove some parts of the image.

Where are the kids?

Harry the Little - for fun

Preserving only a little part of the main view of the image and processing one dimension with Liquid Scaler can create funny effects.

After applying liquid scaling with masks and changing one of the dimensions

We strongly encourage you to try the plugin yourself and share the effects you get! In order to try it, download it from the official website on wikidot.com: Liquid Rescale GIMP plugin.

This article is a direct translation of text published on author’s blog: Gimp - Liquid rescaling

Translated by titter, proof-read by Jake Conroy