VSO Seam Carving is a free windows application designed to allow anyone to apply the principle of seam carving to their photos. Seam carving is a technique primarily designed for resizing photos without affecting the proportions of important aspects of the photo. VSO Seam Carving also includes an option to remove items from an image, either while resizing an image or maintaining an image size.
The process works by taking information from multiple irregular thin slices of an image and using this information, either to generate new natural looking textures to fill the extra space or deleting the slices altogether so that the image can be reduced in size.
Highlights of VSO Seam Carving
VSO Seam Carving is a piece of software that undertakes a seemingly complex procedure in very user friendly way.
- Mask parts of an image that you do not want to be changed in any way
- Select elements in a photo to be removed
- Increase and decrease the size of photos
- Convert images to common pre-set proportion ratios
Why Use VSO Seam Carving
The description of VSO Seam Carving sounds like magic and, despite watching a video outline of the software, I was a little skeptical. However it actually does do a good job of resizing images and very rapidly also.
The masking tools make it very easy to protect specific areas from being changed and also to mark elements that need to be removed from an image completely.
There is a plug-in for GIMP that offers a similar feature and Adobe Photoshop has its content aware tools, but for some users there maybe a convenience in having a lightweight tool designed to specifically undertake this operation.
Some Limitations of VSO Seam Carving
Users do need to note that while VSO Seam Carving can produce genuinely impressive results, the effectiveness of the final results do depend on the source image. User intervention is also an issue as some care does need to be taken with masking areas or selecting elements for removal.
This can be a very powerful tool, but it won't always perform as hoped and produce perfect, or even usable, results. However, even in cases where the results aren't as good as hoped for, it may produce a result that can be polished with a little manual retouching to produce a satisfactory result more quickly than manual retouching ever could.
Help and Support
There isn't a great deal of support with VSO Seam Carving, but it is essentially an experimental piece of software at the time of writing. This forum thread contains a download link for the software, some examples of it in use, plus a video, followed by a small range of user comments. That's it basically for support, but if you've used an image editor before, I'd press you to download it and give it a go. If it works for you, then great. If not, it's cost you nothing but a little time.