[ lofo’s weblog ]

A friend of mine recently emailed me a link to the youtube video below with “‘Windows Vista Paint - ‘The Photoshop Killer’” in the subject line.

I was honestly very intrigued and thought “Could Microsoft have really improved Paint that much!?”. Well, you’ll have to watch the video to see for yourself.

[youtube v/Hxx2KcPWWZg]

Later that same day I received an RSS feed from Guardian Unlimited about a new technology two Israeli computer scientists developed that pretty much puts Microsoft Paint to shame and could very well be the real “Photoshop Killer”. The following video displays this technology that Dr. Shai Avidan and Dr. Ariel Shamir have written about in their research paper entitled Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing.

[youtube v/qadw0BRKeMk]

Now that you’ve been fascinated beyond all belief that something like this even exists, why not try it for yourself? TechCrunch has reported of an online working demo created by Patrick Swieskowski in which you can try resizing your own images using the very same Seam Carving technology as shown in the video above.

It seems that this new way of editing images is already causing quite a debate regarding the authenticity of images seen by viewers online in places such as news reporting sites. The majority of images used online today are edited in some fashion. Crop here, remove the red-eye there, change the contrast of the whole image, and so on. However, will this technology go too far in infringing on the truthfulness of the images we see reported to us online? Where do you think the line will be carved for the use of this incredibly unique new technology?