Using Liquid Rescale GIMP Plugin for Resizing Images Without Distortion

Liquid Rescale is a GIMP plugin designed to make it easy to resize images and change their proportions without the image becoming visibly distorted. It uses a technique called seam carving, which is also utilized by the application VSO Seam Carving, which I wrote about a while back. However, where the VSO application was a a stand alone piece of software, Liquid Rescale is designed to work with GIMP and if you're already a GIMP user, then this may be a preferable option.

If you stretch or squeeze an image in GIMP normally, the image will be uniformly distorted with areas appearing stretched or squashed depending on how you're changing the image's size. Seam Carving seeks to avoid this issue by adding or removing parts of an image.

When increasing the size of a photo, Liquid Rescale looks for series' of pixels within an image that can be duplicated and used to fill the new space without forming obvious regular patterns. When reducing the size of an image, pixels are identified that can be discarded without adversely affecting the image.

You should be aware that even using seam carving, aspects of a photo may become slightly distorted, particularly when increasing the size dramatically, though the use of masks offers a degree of control to ensure that this doesn't affect the main subjects of an image.

The next few pages will take you through the process of installing the Liquid Rescale GIMP plugin and then using it to resize a photo.

• How to Use Liquid Rescale GIMP Plugin - Resizing Images Without Distortion
• Download and Install Liquid Rescale
• Select and Open an Image
• Add a Preservation Mask
• Rescale Your Image