Adjust the strength to the highest value, set the width value by clicking Auto size: Width so that the image is scaled to the appropriate width for the item you are removing and click Interactive. In this case you use a Feature Discard Mask – and paint in red over the area that you want removed from the image. In my image let’s take out the large pole in the foreground. The plug-in also has a tool that you can use to remove elements from the photo. The protected areas have not been touched. Here I chose for the image to be reduced from 3571 to 2500 pixels wide, and the surfer, boards and flags have all reduced well.

Type the size for the new image and click Interactive and wait as the image is resized. Anything else can be adjusted except these elements. I’ve added some other bits I don’t want skewed out of alignment like the vertical poles too. In my case, that is the swimmer at the front of the image and the lifeguard and boards at the back.

The paint color will be set to green so select a brush, enlarge it to an appropriate size and paint over anything on the image that you do not want to change as the image is resized. To do this, click the original image again and choose Layer > Liquid rescale and set up the Output tab options.Ĭlick Feature Masks and, to create a protective mask, click the Feature Preservation Mask option and click New. To see how this can be done, I’ll take this beach image and size it down from 3571 pixels wide to 3000. You might use this, for example, where you have a rectangular image that you want to make into a square image without losing any detail. The same tool can scale an image up to make it larger in one direction – and this time it will create extra data in the image to fill the space. You might use this, for example, to remove some empty area from the middle of an image where the more interesting parts of the image are to either side of it. This gives you basically the same looking image but smaller in one dimension. You use it to reduce an image’s size but, where the crop tool removes the data from one or more sides of an image, content aware resizing removes it from the middle of the image.

This plug-in is an alternative to the crop tool. Close Gimp, install the application and then reopen Gimp and you will see the application on the Layer menu.

The tool is called Liquid Rescale which you can download from here. Today I’m going to show you a plug-in for Gimp that does pretty much the same thing. I also mentioned the online application called Rsizr. In a previous post, I looked at content aware resizing in Photoshop CS4 which is the same as in CS5.

Online content aware scale generator