App Review: Liquid Scale, now you see it, now you don't

Liquid Scale is an application described by the developer as an app that allows you to scale images horizontally or vertically without distorting the content, in other words it allows you to cut out unwanted areas of a photo, and splice it back together.

AppStore Description: Liquid Scale allows to scale images horizontally or vertically without distorting the content. A Photo with too much background can be condensed to its main motif. It’s possible to mark image areas to remove or preserve them. No question: Anybody can now perform tricks with images.

Is your image too wide for the vacation blog? Do you need a square avatar photo? Does the beautiful landscape shot not fit into the frame? Using Liquid Scale you can easily adjust the correct size without distorting the image. Move two people closer to each other, remove unwanted third persons or create an impressing panorama.

Features:

• "Content Aware Image Resizing"
• Mark areas for removal or to preserve them
• Send results directly by mail or save them into the camera roll
• Before-after toggle
• Select from three qualities (low, medium or high resolution)
• Live Seams View. Using this feature you can see exactly what’s going on while resizing.

The App

Launch the app and you are taken directly to the home screen where you have the following icons.

From left to right you have...

• File icon -tap this to select a photo from the camera roll.
• Camera icon - tap this to take a photo from with in the app itself.
• +/- icon - tap this to reveal a sub-menu where you highlight the area of the photo that you wish to remove (-) or keep (+).
• Arrow icon (export) - tap this icon to either save your image to the camera roll or email it via the mail app.
• Cog icon - tap this to enter the apps settings menu.

Above: The various stages to remove the unwanted area of the photoTo get started with Liquid Scale, first select or take a photo and load it in to the app.  Once loaded tap the +/- icon and from the sub-menu decide if you want to erase areas, or highlight areas to keep. Having made your selection, tap done icon and you will see two progress bars moving from the outer edges of the photo to the middle.  This is showing the progress of the app analyzing your request, and when the two progress bars have met in the middle, then your photo is ready for the unwanted areas of the photo to be removed. The removal of any unwanted areas of the photo is a simple manual process, and is done by touching on the edges of the photo and pinching together. As you do this, you will see what I will describe as lightning effect running down or across your photo as the highlighted areas are removed.  Continue pinching until all the unwanted areas have been removed and when you're happy simply tap the export icon and save or email your finished photo.

So what do I think about Liquid Scale?

Above: Close-up you can see the splice linesI am not a fan of these slice and dice apps, however this app with the right subject does produced some surprisingly good results, although as the close-up shows you can see the splice lines, which is something you will see on most photos processed in this way.

The app itself is very easy to use, although a little slow processing the edit (although it is doing a lot of work), and saved images are kind of full resolution, however because you are effectively cropping the image, then the size will depend on the extent of the area being erased.

Despite my general dislike for these types of apps (as they generally do not work very well, or produce unappealing results), this app does seem to work quite well, and so I'll give it 3 out of 5.

Above: The original photoAbove: The same photo with the guard removedThe bottom line

If this is the kind of app you need, then this one seems to do a good job.

AppStore Link: Liquid Scale - Price £1.19/$1.99

Press Release: Liquid Scale, image resizing application for the iPhone coming January 2010

*** Content aware image resizing is coming to the iPhone ***

Savoy Software developed a highly polished image resizing application for the iPhone called Liquid Scale. Liquid Scale resizes pictures while magically keeping the important features of the image intact. It works on all kinds of images—intelligently removing or adding pixels to preserve important parts of the picture.

Liquid Scale enables new creative ways of editing images. It resizes pictures without deforming or cropping the content. In a fast and intuitive way pictures can be transformed to a new aspect ratio. The elegant iPhone application enables all the possibilities of content aware image resizing. Whether you want to change your image from portrait to landscape format without cropping interesting parts or deleting parts in the image without doing a complex retouch. The beautiful interface makes it fun to play with images from your photo roll.

To make this technique work on a small device like the iPhone where both memory and CPU power are a scarce resource our developers had to employ all their wizardry. After bringing down memory requirements to a 3rd of the initial implementation and squeezing every bit of performance out of the algorithms CPU time could be reduced by a factor of four.