I’m not a graphic designer and has never used any heavy weight image editing software such as Adobe Photoshop. So far I am happy with the basic image editing features found in the screen capture software HyperSnap. The screenshots that were taken during testing and reviewing a software normally requires simple editing such as resizing. Some windows which are wider than the width of the post content area needs to be resized so that it doesn’t overlap the sidebar. The resize feature in HyperSnap is called “scale”. I would first crop out the unnecessary areas then only followed by scaling it to a smaller size with the “Keep aspect ratio” checked or else the image would appear squeezed or stretched. The biggest challenge that I find in resizing images is when I need to insert a vertically tall photo into a horizontal wide space. No matter how I crop or scale the image, it would either look bad or some important key areas are being cut off.

Luckily I’ve just learned out about Seam Carving, which is also known as image retargeting that allows an image to change sizes without distorting key areas of interest. This image resizing algorithm is developed by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir. If you’re a Photoshop user, you may already know about this feature since CS4.


Basically this impressive method of image resizing is made possible by removing areas of the image that will go unnoticed. You can view the video below for a more detailed explanation on how seam carving works.

Most of the time using seam carving algorithm to automatically resize your image may cause some of the key areas being distorted especially on human beings. To fix this problem, fortunately you are able to mark the areas that you want to preserve or remove in order to reize the image while preserve the key areas.

Before installing any third party software to try out image retargeting using seam carving, you can test it on rsizr.com. Simply upload an image from your computer, move the handle on the vertical slider to create horizontal seams, and move the handle on the horizontal slider to create vertical seams. Once you’ve done that, you will see handles appear around your image that allow you to resize the image. If the resize doesn’t look good, feel free to use the preserve, remove, and erase brushes.