Digital image editing has always been a challenge; it's difficult to transform a 300x600 image to 100X500 image without cropping out something important or distorting the original image. The ingenious Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir have created an amazing digital photo editing tool that is content aware. Using a process they call "Seam Carving," the tool preserves the most vital parts of an image and removes the unimportant parts when you resize it. Their method was presented in a paper at SIGGRAPH 2007. An online demo video has the blogosphere whipped up in geeky excitement, and is definitely worth watching. Adobe just hired Avidan along with a couple of other digital imaging innovators, which has Photoshop users ecstatic with the prospect of this feature being included in a future version.

Via Techcrunch.